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This Weekend Facebook announced a new Facebook Felloship Program for 2010-2011. The program supports full-time Ph.D. students working on topical areas like Internet Economics, Cloud Computing, Social Computing, Data Mining and Machine Learning, Systems or Information Retrieval. Students must be enrolled in e.g. Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture and recommended by a faculty member. Deadline is Friday  February 15, 2010. Further information, the application checklist and instructions can be found here. It’ll be a tough competition. Good luck everybody!

(image: Facebook logo)

KMF – Social Media in Europe and Germany

KMF Werbung GmbH, a german advertising, online and CRM agency published a video on Youtube in December 2009 with latest facts about the growth of social media in Europe and Germany.

Social Media Revolution

This is a really compact, nice video of what social media is in numbers.

Some examples:

1. Login page: slogans don’t feel like proper German or are just word by word translations: ‘

• Facebook ermöglicht dir das Teilen von Inhalten und öffnet sowie vernetzt deine Welt“ (engl.: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life”),

• Es ist kostenlos und jeder kann beitreten (“It’s free and anyone can join”).

2. Start page:

• I just read that a friend is not longer listed as engaged. In German it says: Name ist nicht mehr als [Kommentieren]. They missed to put in the verb.
• Where it says “name shares link” (e.g. from Google Reader), it is translated on the profile. Do it one way or the other, but don’t mix both.

3. Profile:

• Under the profile picture of a friend I can suggest friends for him or her. The German translation is Freunde für Name vorschlagen. This is not proper German and just another word by word translation. Name Freunde vorschlagen would be a much better choice.

Ad on Facebook

Besides those minor notes, I don’t see why it is necessary to have two buttons in the top navigation linking both on my profile (click profile and the name button on the right, next to settings). Another thing which might be confusing for new german users are ads on the right side of your profile which pretend to be a part of facebook. Most people switching from StudiVZ or other german social networks need some time to discover and learn how to use the site, and clicking once on a wrong button could mean to loose them right away. Although the embessador campagn is going to motivate loads of german users to sign into Facebook, Facebook has to get up a fully proper german Facebook translation rapidly. Missing words, lame slogans or word by word translations are not suitable for a company like Facebook, which is ranked under the US Top 5 valuable companies.

(image: Facebook)

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. ]]> http://vividnetworking.net/2008/10/02/zuckerberg-in-berlin/feed/ 0