The Cambridge Analytica scandal put Facebook into big trouble: all of the sudden all concerns regarding Facebook's data collection habits and use of this data came true. You know things are getting serious, when Mark Zuckerberg has to put on a suit. There has already a lot been said an written about the whole affair, so I'm not going to write yet another post about this topic, instead I am going to write about a time before Facebook and about a particular social network, we used back then. With the dominance of Facebook today, it is difficult to imagine, that there was a time when Facebook was just a (compared to today) small social network that was targeted to college students.
Anyhow, let me take you back to a time before Facebook became popular (or even know) in the German-speaking world: 2008. I already wrote about 2007 and that I'm a nostalgic fool. 2008 was a very formative year for me and one I really like to think about. Why? I guess because I was young and had a lot freedom (free-time) :D
The social network I want to talk about is studiVZ, the name is a abbreviation of Studiverzeichnis, which itself is a abbreviation of Studentenverzeichnis, which means register/index of students. I never liked the name, it's a rather stupid name, because even though it came from the early days of social networks, having "register" in its name is just plain unsexy for a social network to say the least. The site also launched two spin-offs: SchülerVZ (a social network for pupils) and MeinVZ (a social network for everyone). They kept naming their networks register/index also for their spin-offs. Especially MeinVZ is a horrible name, since it means "my register". If you are now thinking: "maybe it does make sense in German", no it doesn't, it's just as weird in German as it is in English.
StudiVZ launched in 2006 and was basically what Facebook was in 2006 but in red instead of blue. Just look at the screenshot below, of course they updated the look of the site, but they never made huge changes, especially compared how Facebook changed in the last 10 years.
If you remember how Facebook looked like 10 years ago: yes, it's pretty much just a colour-swap. Even though Facebook wasn't officially available in Europe back then, people knew how it looked like and so studiVZ had to defend itself against the accusation of plagarism, luckily for them the users didn't care and the network grew quite fast, starting from campuses all over Austria, German and Switzerland (as a side note: studiVZ came from Germany and Germany doesn't really have the best track-record for spawning new and innovative tech companies, especially the founders of Rocket Internet are known for just copying good ideas from Silicon Valley, entering the German market with this stolen ideas and then try to sell their star-ups, once they reached a solid user-base in the German market back to the company they stole the idea from, unsurprisingly they also invested in studiVZ).
It didn't only look like Ye Olde Facebook, it pretty much was Facebook (and got sued by Facebook because of that), so it was the all-in-one social network solution of back in the day: connecting with your friends, chatting with your friends, uploading pictures, getting in touch with people who are in the same lectures or have the same interests, flirting (once when I was going out in 2008, I overheard a girl telling a guy: "just look me up on studiVZ", that was the moment when I realised: "wow, this thing is big") and much more. One thing that was rather special about studiVZ were the groups. Yes, groups are (well, actually were) a pretty standard feature for a social network, the idea behind them is quite simple: find people who have the same interests as you and get in touch with them. In studiVZ they were put quite prominently on you profile page, so they instead of being there for discussions, they became an opportunity to show off how funny and cool you are. Here are some examples:
- Ich glühe härter vor, als Du Party machst (I pre-game harder than you party)
- Ich leb in meiner eigenen Welt. Das ist OK, man kennt mich dort. (I live in my own world. That's OK, they know me there)
- Nein. Ich hab keine Zeit. Ich muss lernen. Wann soll ich da sein? (No. I don't have time. I have to study. When should I be there?)
- Warum is am Ende vom Geld immer noch so viel Monat übrig??? (Why there is always so much month left at the end of the money???)
- Erzähl mal von gestern! Ich war doch auch da, oder? (Tell me about yesterday! I was there as well, right?)
Yep, since showing off is a big part of social networks, it's not really surprising. Although today we are more doing it in the form of pictures on Instagram.
I joined the platform in late 2007, when my time in the army was coming to an end, because I thought it would be nice to know what my former comrades are doing in their lives, around the same time also pretty much all of my friends joined, which was of course great and made me spend quite some time on the platform (especially looking at pictures of the last weekend).
StudiVZ was a big hit, especially for people who are at university or (like me) are about to enter university, thinking back pretty much everyone of my friends was on StudiVZ, also those who didn't study, so in 2008 StudiVZ launched the aforementioned MeinVZ, so that really everybody can connect with his peers. If you were young during that time and lived in a German speaking country, there was almost no way of avoiding this social network. Sure there ere other social networks before, but I don't think that any had the similar impact that StudiVZ and MeinVZ had and I have to say that it was quite fun and just looking at the page makes me nostalgic.
After StudiVZ launched, it also had some problems with privacy, since this is a big deal in Germany, they were working on it and I would say that 2008 and 2009 were the golden years for StudiVZ (even though in 2009 a security hole allowed collecting large quantities of user data). Also during this time StudiVZ was copying ideas from Facebook: in 2009 they introduced the "Buschfunk" (bush telegraph), which are the same as Facebook's status updates, except that no one could interact with your updates. They also launched an API for external developers. When I read this for the first time I was thinking "wow, now they have something to compete with Facebook". Quite soon it turned out, that I was wrong with this assumption. I don't know when the first external apps were launched, but I know that it was too late.
In 2010 Facebook officially came to the countries in which studiVZ was ruling so far (as far as I remember, it also could have been a bit earlier). StudiVZ grew very fast, but it shrank even faster: withing less than half a year the onece vibrant landing page become less and less active. As the network became less and less active, I as well logged less and less often into studiVZ. There is an interview with the studiVZ CEO (in German) from 2010, where he talked about studiVZ and its future, surprisingly the term "Facebook" was more often used than the term "studiVZ". Especially remarkable is a quote from him saying "The Facebook hype will decrease." Needless to say that it did not. The masses left studiVZ and migrated to Facebook. You can think of a lot of reasons why that happend, but I guess it was because Facebook was just "cooler" than studiVZ: it allowed you to connect with people all around the world (in theory studiVZ did the same, but there were hardly any non German speaking people on the site) and in terms of technology Facebook was just superior.
As I mentioned above, Facebook was suing studiVZ because of copyright infringements. But before that Facebook tried to buy studiVZ, some speculate in order to get the price of studiVZ down (link in German), tech can be quite a dirty business some times. The back-then owner of studiVZ, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, however didn't sell because of legal issues concerning privacy (link in German, which made them miss out on a huge sum of money, but ironically the recent Facebook scandal showed that these concerns were actually vaild. Holtzbrinck sold studiVZ in 2013 (link in German), they kept SchülerVZ, but only to close it one year after. The new owner of studVZ declared bankruptcy last year in September (link in German), after being sued by Holtzbrinck.
However, the surprising thing is that despite its rapid fall and the fact that the owner is now bankrupt studiVZ is still around and you can still use it (but most likely you are going to be alone). While writing this post I was on it and I have to say that it aged very badly: the page is slow and unresponsive, the design is straight out of 2006 and the overall experience makes you realise how much the internet has developed over the last decade. The last update from a "friend" (studiVZ also uses the same terminology as Facebook) happened in 2012, to my surprise the last update in a group where I'm a member (a Scrubs fan group, again, yes this shows how much 00ies the whole platform still is) happened in December of last year. Unfortunately it was a guy posting pictures of his penis, not sure if he is a spammer or just a guy who likes to post pictures of his penis online and doesn't want people to actually see them. In 2014, 2016 and 2017 Lea, a moderator who is most likely a bot, posted birthday wishes on my profile page. I used to log on studiVZ roughly once a year and it is always a nice trip down memory lane. Now with GDPR around the corner and the owner being bankrupt, I'm wondering how long I will be able to do such nostalgic trips.
Believe it or not, but there used to be a time when Facebook wasn't this huge behemoth it is now and left some room for other platforms, which were basically doing the same thing. StudiVZ couldn't hold a candle to Facebook, but if you look around, there is still one social network (VK) that has resisted Facebook so far.
In the face of the recent data scandal and Web 3.0 just being around the corner, I don't know if 10 years from now I'll write something about the ye goode olde days on Facebook.