...to StudiVZ? You don't know what StudiVZ is? Well, then you are probably not German, or a good deal younger/older then I am. Because for most German students of my age, the social network StudiVZ was the big thing between 2006 and 2008.
In the summer of 2006, a friend told me about this new website for university students where you could network with people, share information about yourself and join discussion groups. I was curious – as a good journalism student should be – so created an account. It had a pretty basic looking design, mostly in red and white, and asked me for some basic information: where I was studying, what I was studying, what kind of music I liked and so on. After about half an hour filling in more information than I would normally have told a girl on a first date back then, I uploaded a picture and my first foray into social media had begun. Initially this was not as exciting as you might suspect, particularly because one of the first things StudiVZ told me was: “You have no friends!”
Thankfully that soon changed – after I sent the first few friend requests I also started receiving them, mostly with nice messages saying how great it is that I joined. In hindsight, this is rather strange since none of us really knew why we joined, except for curiosity. That was the first big phase of StudiVZ: First there was curiosity, then there was the hype, with people spending whole days on the platform as everybody and their mothers joined up. Then there was the phase where politicians started warning people about it, mostly because of privacy issues (but also because that's basically what they do – there's a whole group of German politicians that constantly warns people about the dangers of the internet...)
And then there was the lawsuit against Facebook. Early in 2008 there were already rumours that StudiVZ was basically just a copy of Facebook (which back then few people in Germany had even heard of) and, in July, Facebook actually sued StudiVZ. The argument was settled out of court, but at that time the German social network was already past its prime – more and more users switched to Facebook and started deleting their StudiVZ accounts and, by end of 2009, the site was more or less deserted. I received some birthday messages on there in 2010, but that was about it – nowadays most people I know have deleted their accounts or forgotten their passwords.
The website is still online and it seems there are actually some people who still use it actively, but when I logged onto my old account again to do some research for this blog, all I could find were nostalgic memories which left me thinking if the same thing could one day happen to a site like Facebook when the next big thing rolls around...
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