ShareThis reports that it is now.

How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind.

The Numbers

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how popular sharing by email is. It's clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one however, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The big surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely popular ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively short time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites that have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal's blog, which is always a great place to discover new things about the web.

Why This is Important

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It's an important detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most popular can help make this decision. Here at RWW we don't use ShareThis, we use another service called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn't offer sharing by Facebook at all - something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, however, include the following:

• Your site's audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren't a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb stories on MySpace - but maybe we're wrong!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren't for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Delicious users, for example, don't necessarily think of what they are doing as sharing (it's often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very popular ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.

From a company called Blue Whale Systems Ltd., makers of a free mobile push application called BlueWhaleMail, there now comes a new push application: Facebook. Via the BlueWhaleMail app, you can be notified of your friends' status updates, wall posts, and news items. You also have the ability to send pokes, create wall posts, and email messages. The notifications you receive are displayed on your phone as soon as they as show up on Facebook...and there's no need for you to have to browse to the Facebook web site to either view them or respond.

What's BlueWhaleMail?

Out of the 2.7 billion people with mobile phones, those not carrying a smartphone still represent the majority of handset owners. But these people deserve an easy way to access their email and social network notifications, too, even if they can't afford or don't want to pay for a sophisticated smartphone.

Says Michael Maguire, founder and CTO, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion, "My team and I think there are some great dedicated mobile email devices out there - but we're biased, because half of us helped build one of them. Unfortunately the rest of the world's 1.1 billion email users have phones with unusable, hard to configure in-built email that few people can be bothered to set-up. With BlueWhaleMail, we've gone back to the drawing board so that people can keep the phone they like and still stay in touch on the go."

At the moment, the BlueWhaleMail app is only available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones, but that list will grow in time as BlueWhaleMail branches out to serve the needs of those who carry "ordinary" mobile phones.

Where To Download

BlueWhaleMail can be downloaded from http://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail/ or by browsing to m.bluewhale.net on your mobile phone. The application is ad-supported and features a small banner ad at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer.

To learn more about BlueWhaleMail, check out this video, where founder Michael Maguire discusses the application:

BlueWhaleMail Interview with Michael Maguire - video powered by Metacafe

Anyone who has the iPhone or iPod Touch can tell you that one of the best things about owning the device is the ability to add apps from iTunes App Store. Although many of the apps that we talk about here are the free ones like the social networking apps, the instant messaging apps, and the blogging apps, it's the paid apps that are making the store a financial success.

According to today's Wall Street Journal, in the month since the Apple App Store opened, users have downloaded over 60 million programs for their iPhone or iPod Touch. Out of those that were downloaded, Apple sold an average of $1 million per day in paid applications, which brought in around $30 million over the course of the month.

If they stay the course, the App Store will make at least $360 million a year, but Steve Jobs isn't setting for that:

"This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," he told the WSJ reporter. "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."

However, it's worth noting that Apple won't be raking in those millions just for themselves - they only keep 30% of the proceeds, a good portion of which go to cover the costs of credit card transactions and help keep the App Store up-and-running. It's really the apps' creators who stand to gain, as they keep 70% of the proceeds.

What sort of paid apps are doing well? A quick glance at the App Store reveals that answer: games. Sega can back that up, too. They sold more than 300,000 copies of their Super Monkeyball game ($9.99) in only 20 days. According to Simon Jeffery, president of Sega's U.S. division: "It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform."

But with numbers like these, we would argue that the iPhone goes beyond just being a gaming platform - they're a computing platform now...and a profitable one at that.

Apple Inc company profile provided by TradeVibes

Music-based social networking site Imeem is getting a lot of the right kind of press currently, based on strong traffic growth and key deals with record labels. We last wrote about Imeem in March, when they launched a developer platform that enabled read/write access to user information and more. As we explained then, Imeem is a site where users can listen to licensed streaming music, as well as upload music and blog about it - all for free.

As SfGate.com reported tonight, Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it's now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US.

That puts it above one of our favorites, CBS-owned last.fm. It also is making MySpace sit up and take notice, as MySpace plans to launch an ad-supported music service itself - perhaps as soon as September.

King of the Online Music Deal

There's a lot to like about Imeem. Starting with the music. As we noted in March Imeem has licensing deals with all four major labels and "80% of the indy music market", which means that you can find almost anything you want on the site and listen to it for free.

The user experience is also great - it's also another of an increasing number of sites powered by Adobe's Flex and Flash technologies. And check out Fanbase, an Adobe AIR app that Atlantic Records (a subsidiary of Warner Music Group) created in collaboration with Imeem. We reviewed Fanbase recently and said it is "no ordinary desktop music player". We explained that instead of simply streaming tunes, Fanbase lets you connect with other users through an integrated chat feature while also viewing a continuous feed of both the official and the unofficial news, photos, and videos. You can also customize the app by choosing which artists you want it to display from the dropdown menu or the "Manage" screen.

Imeem Lording it Over MySpace Already

Imeem is leading the charge in the free, ad-supported online music market. It has deals with all four of the major record labels: EMI, Universal, Sony and Warner Music. In contrast, MySpace only has three of them - EMI hasn't signed with MySpace. What's more, according to SFGate Imeem also has a deal with Viacom's MTV Networks to show videos from Comedy Central, MTV and VH1.

Together with the launch of its platform in March, Imeem also has an extensive widget program in place. This means that Imeem music can be listened to on a wide range of websites - giving it another advantage over MySpace.

Imeem has a second-to-none pedigree in Internet music, having been started by people from companies like Napster and Tivo, and acquiring Napster founder Sean Fanning's Snocap late last year. To be fair, MySpace has a pretty decent background in music too - it was said to be the driving force behind MySpace becoming popular in the first place.

In terms of users, Imeem had more than 27 million unique visitors in June according to comScore and it gets 65,000 registered users per day. The company also says it gets more than 85 million total unique visitors of its widgets. These are impressive stats, although MySpace is still much bigger - with an estimated 120 million users.

But Can it Earn Money?

It's not necessarily all rosy. According to a recent CNN article, Imeem may struggle to earn a decent revenue. It estimates that Imeem is getting an average CPM of $4 per page, which CNN thinks is insufficient to pay the record labels. CNN states that the major labels control 86% of all album sales in the United States and that they "generally want to be paid about a penny each time someone listens to one of their songs at a website like Imeem." However Imeem counters that they have "ad revenue-sharing" arrangements with the record companies, rather than the standard penny-a-song contracts. Also Warners has invested in Imeem. The same CNN article estimates MySpace Music revenue will be around $3 CPM, so even here Imeem seems to have the upper hand.

Both Imeem and MySpace will continue implementing alternative revenue models. For example Imeem had a deal with movie star turned musician Scarlett Johansson, who released her album "Anywhere I Lay My Head" exclusively on Imeem in May.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that Imeem has serious momentum, and backing (Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures are investors). With all 4 record labels behind it and an especially cozy relationship with Warners, together with traffic that is rocketing upwards, Imeem appears poised to tip big time into the mainstream. You cannot of course count out MySpace Music, it is a joint venture after all with 3 of the 4 big record labels. But Imeem's growth rate and buzz is reminiscent of that of YouTube just before it got huge.

Watch this space, or should we say listen to it.

At last100 [a ReadWriteWeb Network blog], we love the iPhone as much as anyone. Yet we remain convinced that for all of Apple's innovation - especially on the mobile browsing front and major improvements in usability - the iPhone in its current incarnation will have significant but limited appeal.

There's only one iPhone, and in the smartphone market, one size doesn't fit all.

Case in point: I love a QWERTY thumboard. Although the iPhone's virtual keyboard is the best of its kind, it isn't a real keyboard. And in the words of Duncan Bannatyne from the TV program Dragon's Den, for that reason, and that reason alone. I'm out.

(Left to right: Palm Treo 650, HTC Touch Diamond, Nokia E61, Nokia E71, Samsung Tocco)

The iPhone's camera is nothing to call home about too, and there's no video recording capability either. Enter Nokia's N95 which excels at media production. On the other hand, if you want a real choice of third-party apps, Windows Mobile and now the iPhone is where the action is at.

I'm also noticing a blurring of the lines between so-called smartphones - once the realm of business or power users only - and what are termed 'feature phones', which often focus on either music, video playback, photography or gaming.

Smartphones are getting more consumer friendly, and feature phones are getting smarter. As an example, just yesterday I took loan of a Samsung Tocco. Along with its iPhone-like finger friendly interface, it offers 'smart' features such as email, full web browsing, an RSS reader, calendar etc, along with a generous 5 megapixel camera, the standard music and video playback functionality, and even a basic video editor. The only thing that stops it from being classified as a smart phone in our eyes is the lack of third-party applications aside from Java games (as far as I could tell), and perhaps the omission of Wi-Fi.

In the next few weeks, at last100 we'll publish reviews of Nokia's new 'Blackberry killer' the E71, the Samsung Tocco (mentioned above), and the successor to the N95, Nokia's soon-to-be released N96. We're also trying to source a Blackberry Bold. All very different devices, and proof that one size doesn't fit all.

Now, where's my iPhone nano with a slide out QWERTY thumboard?

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

The TrendsSpotting blog has produced a thorough overview of Online China, collected from a variety of sources such as Universal McCann, CNNIC, Pew Internet, Hitwise, comScore and more. The report focus on three key themes: 1) China as an online leader, 2) the competitive landscape in Search, IM & Web 2.0, and 3) Business in Online China. TrendsSpotting says that these are "key indicators of the ongoing development of the dynamic Internet market in China." It's a great report, embedded below. You can also view it on Slideshare.

You've probably been in those meetings too: someone mentions a cool, "edgy" (uh-oh) youth-oriented campaign, and someone else says "video", and then someone else completes the axis of online evil with the word "viral".

It's been said over and over again, but maybe one more time would help: "viral" can be encouraged, it can be prayed for, but it can't be engineered. Your only hope is to create engaging, compelling content, and tell a terrific story... and then hope.

There's an interesting discussion going around about the possibility of T-Mobile taking some cues from Apple with an app store of their own. Instead of offering it to a specific phone, T-Mobile wants to take things one step further and open up a platform for all of their mobile devices. Who can blame them? Their current mobile store is equivalent to a mess when compared with Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. However what is it that makes the App Store so appealing and will more carriers follow suit?

Buying Mobile Apps for Your Phone

The user experience of downloading an app from Apple's App Store is something to speak on. It's by far the best mobile user experience I've ever had. However, I've never been interested in purchasing and downloading apps from Microsoft or Verizon when it comes to my Motorola Q9c. Instead, I've headed straight to the developer's site or simply didn't bother. I don't think I'm alone in this situation. I've seen family members purchase ringtones and ringback tones galore, yet not one of them has ever bothered to purchase an application. There are three reasons why they may not have have never purchased an app from their respective carriers:

1. The costs are ridiculous
2. The offerings are not interesting
3. They don't know what they're doing

If You're Going to do it, do it Right

Apple has offered resolutions for the aforementioned three reasons. The developers set the cost, not the carrier. A gang of great applications exist in Apple's App Store to please a variety of users with varying interests. However, these are not only great games, but the graphics and user interfaces are usually superior to applications on other mobile platforms.

On the other hand, most iPhone users are tech savvy. While it's simple enough for mainstream users to use, it's marketed to early adopters and geeks across the globe. You can bet your bottom dollar they know what they're doing. In turn, the App Store is a reflection of the iPhone userbase. This is a formula that T-Mobile and others would be wise to implement if they plan to pursue their own App Store.

If you've ever wondered what the headlines at the top of your Gmail inbox are, they're called "web clips", not ads. Gmail has a preselected amount of news headlines from various sites across the web that you can customize to have displayed across the top of your inbox as you check your mail. Now you're no longer stuck with the default selections and can add your own selections.

Web Clips in Your Inbox

Web Clips are displayed right above your messages in your inbox. To customize your selection of webclips, head to the 'Settings' section of your Gmail account. Listed in your settings should be a tab that reads 'Web Clips'. Select this tab and you'll be presented with a list of default Web Clips. The default selection categories range from News, Business, Lifestyle, Sports, Tech, and Fun.

Customize Your Web Clips

You can choose from any of the listed sites or simply add your own list of blogs. To add your own selections, use the search box to type in the URL of your favorite blog. Google will attempt to find the RSS feed for the site you entered. If it's found, click the add button and you're all set.

The Benefits of Web Clips

I've only recently started using web clips thanks to a tip from our very own Lead Writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick. They're a great way to keep track of those sites that you wouldn't want to miss a thing from. They can also help when trying to manage both your email and feeds first thing in the morning. Use Gmail's web clips for those sites that you'd like to get the latest updates from while you check your email. It'll be a lot less clutter and once less thing to multitask.

It's the weekend, so time for our review the past week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we showed you how to create a custom search engine using social bookmarks, found out why online video is set for a boost at the Olympics, analyzed a new mainstream RSS Reader, and checked in with Windows Live. On the trends side we answered Mozilla's call for visions of the future of the Web, also looked into the future of blogging, checked out what big brands are doing with social media for the Olympics, and analyzed the gender of the Semantic Web (yes you read that correctly).

Web Products

Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks

Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.com, the site got a revamped UI and added new features like selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. However, amid the delighted oohs and ahhs from the tech community over the new-and-improved site, some people were raising the valid question: "Who bookmarks anymore?" Besides bookmarking for the sake of making sure a site gets seen in your FriendFeed stream, the truth is that many people bookmark, but then turn to Google search when they actually want to find something.

Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video

The Beijing Olympics started this week and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Mainstreaming RSS: Regator is Now in Public Beta

We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but this week, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.

Microsoft Relaunches Windowslive.com as a Community Site

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. This week, Microsoft re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know

Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future. Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

The Future of Blogging Revealed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

The Olympics & Social Media Marketing

This week we looked at how Web technology is being used in the Beijing Olympics. In this post we check out how some of the world's leading brands are using social media tools in their Olympics campaigns. Our first post discussed how online video will be a big part of this Olympics, which is great for consumers. The Web can also be a boon for brands too, when it comes to major sporting events.

Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Your mother's calling - and there are shoes on sale.

A new study released this week in the UK found that 80% of respondents said they were "happy to have [15 second pre-roll] video ads if it meant they could watch free video" on their phones. Almost nothing's shocking in the wacky world of mobile advertising-to be, but one thing we found absolutely horrifying in the discussion around the study was this: incoming-call ads.

Who's Doing This?

A company called Gigafone appears to be pioneering the practice of showing users advertising when calls or SMS come in to a phone. The system is fully opt-in, users provide personal data about themselves and then the ads are targeted to them based on demographics and interests.

RSS readers can click here to see a poll about incoming-call mobile ads.

The benefits to consumers include more targeted ads, discounts and in some cases phone rate subsidies. It's a little reminiscent of the successful efforts by Blyk, a European company that shows ads in exchange for free minutes and text messages.

Consumer Reactions

Gigafone reports that a huge percentage of customers in test markets are satisfied with the system. People we asked, though, seemed to think that they should receive heavy subsidies for undergoing such an experience. No doubt mobile companies are unlikely to offer the amount of subsidies that customers would like - but we can imagine how this would go down. The practice of offering discounts on nearly everything at the grocery store in exchange for personal information and permission to track our shopping activities would provide an excellent model for this kind of mobile advertising.

Are grocery shoppers who participate in such schemes really getting discounts, or are the rare few who do not just paying a tax? We can imagine a de facto tax being levied against mobile consumers unwilling to have ads shown when their phones ring.

Even though it's opt-in, there are lots of consumer controls and it could help pay for phone service, we (this author at least) do not want commercials associated with the Pavlovian response of paying particular attention to our phones when they ring. There's just something disturbing about the idea.

A 15 second pre-roll ad before watching free video? That sounds annoying enough. A personalized ad when I pull my phone out of my pocket to answer it? No thanks.

Today, Bloglines has unveiled a new skin for its public beta site and has announced that it will start displaying ads on its start page. The new skin for the beta is is quite well done and definitely an improvement over the regular Bloglines interface, as well as the last version of the beta skin. The really interesting news, however, is that Bloglines now, for the first time, features advertising on its service after it had originally abandoned the idea when it created a major controversy back in 2005.

Back in 2005...

Back in 2005, though, we called Bloglines the "Google of RSS," and even today, Bloglines is still slightly ahead of Google Reader in terms of its user base.

Also in 2005, a number of long discussions about advertising on Bloglines and in RSS aggregators in general kept the blogosphere quite busy. Back then, many publishers protested when Bloglines announced that it was planning to put contextual ads next to their content, and in the end, Bloglines backed off from the idea and did not feature any advertising on its site until today. This early controversy around advertising in RSS aggregators probably also led most of Bloglines' competitors like Newsgator or Google Readerto shy away from putting ads on their services as well.

For Now, Ads on Start Page Only

The difference this time, however, is that Bloglines is only putting the ads on the start page, where Bloglines only displays information about the service itself and doesn't feature any external content. According to a post on the Bloglines blog, Bloglines is also pursuing other monetization options within the feed reader, though the post does not go into any specifics.

Yahoo today announced that it will allow its customers to opt out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. Yahoo made this announcement in a response to the an inquiry by U.S. Congressman John Dingell (D- Mich.). Just yesterday, Google had announced a similar opt-out program for its DoubleClick advertising network. Yahoo's opt-out program won't take effect until the end of this month and will be an enhancement of Yahoo's current privacy policies with regard to customized advertising.

Congress Inquiry

There have always been privacy concerns around personalized advertising, though the topic only recently became more of a mainstream issue when the U.S. Congress started an inquiry into the implications of this. As part of this inquiry, Congress asked 33 online advertisers if they offered the option to opt out of these customized ads.

Yahoo goes to great length in its letter to defend customized advertising and explains why advertising on the net is so important, not just as a way for Yahoo to make money, but also because it allows Yahoo to offer free tools to consumers and small businesses.

In the letter, Yahoo also stresses that it does not customize advertising based on potentially "sensitive interest categories" and specifically mentions searches for adult sites and sexual health information.

Will Users Care?

For advertisers, customized ads are obviously a far more effective way of reaching potential customers than regular ads. However, the real question will be if users will indeed chose to opt out of customized advertising. Yahoo's letter mentions that only 75,000 people visited its current opt-out site in July, which is a very small number when compared to Yahoo's overall reach.

Most mainstream users probably don't worry about the privacy implications of these customized ads too much. And those who do worry about it probably already run some form of ad-blocking software and have opted out of online advertising altogether.

Overall, this seems like a great publicity move by Yahoo, even if most users won't make use of the opt-out feature.

Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help

Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn't you like to find those people to connect with them?

Twellow is an automatically generated directory of Twitter users, organized by occupation. It offers to help users quickly ramp up productive use of the popular microblogging service by finding people with common interests. New features were unveiled on the service today that will make it even more useful.

How Does It Work?

A service of news organization WebProNews, Twellow grabs publicly available Twitter messages, then looks at the bio fields of the users who published them. Those bios are analyzed for a variety of keywords that are then used to categorize the users by occupation or interest. Twellow says it is actively developing ways to search for users on other social network by occupational category as well.

What's New?

Today Twellow rolled out an easy way to log-in to their service and associate your profile there with your accounts on other services. For example, nonprofit consultant Ian Wilker (see below) has associated his Twitter account with his accounts on places like Delicious, FriendFeed and LInked in via Twellow. That's useful for context, richer communication and forming further connections.

We think this kind of simple keyword parsing for categorization has a lot of potential. Twitter in particular is a great way to communicate quickly with groups of people, but it's particularly valuable if you can add people with common interests to your network. Twellow is an important service that's worth spending a few minutes with and keeping track of for the future.

You can find RWW writers in conversation on Twitter here.

According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, Facebook tried to acquire the popular German social network StudiVZ. When those negotiations ended without a deal, Facebook decided to sue StudiVZ instead for copying Facebook's look and feel. According to the article, StudiVZ's owners, the German media company Holtzbrinck Gruppe, wanted to sell, but for far more than the $134 million it originally paid for StudiVZ in 2007.

Facebook definitely has a point when it says that StudiVZ is basically nothing more than a copy of its own service. While StudiVZ might use a different color scheme, everything else a user would see is pretty much identical, though the recent changes in Facebook's layout can't be found on StudiVZ (yet?).

Facebook's Slow International Expansion

StudiVZ came to market not long after Facebook and there is obviously no doubt that StudiVZ's founder were heavily influenced by Facebook. Today, Facebook only has about 1.2 million users in Germany while StudiVZ has about 10 times as many.

Facebook, of course, completely ignored the international market and didn't even offer sites for Germany, France, or Spain until earlier this year. This gave others a chance to acquire users, even if they had nothing more to offer than being a Facebook clone. Today, StudieVZ almost looks antiquated when compared to Facebook, yet it has a loyal user base that is not going to switch services very quickly.

Ebay Already Did It

The best parallel to this story is probably that of German auction site Alando - a blatant Ebay clone. Alando, too, quickly became more popular in Germany than Ebay and Ebay was eventually left with no other option than to just buy Alando. Suing StudiVZ is not going to make Facebook any more popular in Germany and given how slowly users migrate between social networks, Facebook's best option is probably to just pay a bit more for StudiVZ now and then reap the benefits in the long run.