Next monday Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook will be in Berlin to kick off the campagn “Deutschland macht blau“. After 4 years of getting Facebook to the number one social network, Facebook wants to see more german students online, which are, by now still underrepresented on Facebook. StudiVZ the german alternative of Facebook, was founded in 2005 and is the leading german social network. Despite from all discussions about any copy and paste activities around the development of StudiVZ, they have over 10 millions users. Still Facebook and StudiVZ shared some undeniable visual simmilarities until the launch of Facebooks new design, the features and the way people use it are in detail very different.

Or simply said, StudiVZ has no feed functions besides the “what are you doing right now” feature, no applications (API), you cannot send emails with StudiVZ and generally it reminds more on the early Facebook. So one could think that it is going to be easy for Zuckerberg to get german students into Facebook. But once a target group is somehow satisfied it is hard to get them encouraged for something new. It is not a question of what are the good and what are the lame things about StudiVZ. Sure, Facebook would win any comparison. But StudiVZ works because its easy to handle, efficient and just after Facebook’s recent visual maturing it is cleaner.

In the end it is not a question of who is the better one, it is question of who better understands the needs of german students and who treats them best. And as long as Facebook is not 100% availble in german it does not really feel like Facebook wants to motivate StudiVZ’s users to switch as it more just seems like Facebook has to be available in german.

On monday 6th at the TU Berlin 4km from the StudiVZ headquarter Mark Zuckerberg will tell us what he thinks about it.