Studivz, a copy of Facebook?
Studivz (http://www.studivz.net/) is a social networking site based in Germany for university students in Europe. It is very similar to the service offered by the US-based social networking site Facebook (http://www.facebook.com). Just like Facebook, it was created by students in Berlin as a directory for college students to use. The site claims to have over a million members as of November 2006 in Europe.
But the site has been criticized for being very similar to Facebook because it uses similar layouts, color schemes, and even similar error messages. In order to check it out and compare for myself, I visited the site. The first thing that caught my eye was that the home page layout of Studivz looks very very similar to Facebook. They both have exactly the same layout except for the color, logo, and that the Studivz site is in German. I couldn’t login and explore the site since I do not know how to read German. 