The last 24 hours saw two important annoucements for the German social media sphere. First was Mark Zuckerberg, surprise guest at Burda's DLD conference in Munich, who officially declared that Facebook now has 2 million active users in Germany. Not bad, given that he counted just 1.26 million last October and only half a million one year ago.
In his appearance on the DLD stage, Mark used the word "share" one billion times. Thanks Mark, this was our way to gain mind share for the next conference at DLD! Next time, we'll try it with the whole phrase. Repeat after me: Share Economy. Ok?
The second announcement was Markus Berger-de León, who was appointed as the new CEO of StudiVZ (which also runs SchülerVZ and MeinVZ). Apparently, nobody liked this job, so StudiVZ's owner Holtzbrinck was forced to find a manager within their own realm. Markus so far runs Abacho and MyHammer, both subsidiaries of Holtzbrinck.
So let's have a look at the Google Trends chart above. It clearly indicates that StudiVZ (red line) has lost momentum. Search volume is essentially flat with a tendency downwards - the same pattern we've already seen for MySpace (yellow). To my surprise, even wer-kennt-wen (green) seems to already have passed its zenit.
The only player left with an exponential growth curve in the German market now is Facebook. Chapeau!
Photo: Netzökonom
I completely agree on the article but i want to mention that the trends diagram has the typical mistake of missing meinvz.
many studivz users have been auto-migrated to meinvz and are therefore heading less regulary to studivz.
but anyway this just saves time nothing else.
facebook will take the lead of social networks within the german speaking region - the second place is more interesting to me: in austria it could become netlog - in germany the game is still open.
but imho social networks(esp. the connect projects) are anyway just the first vision of the features which will mark the internet within the next years (->openweb)
best wishes from vienna
andreas
Even if you count in MeinVZ and SchülerVZ, the trend chart doesn't look much better. Both spin-offs don't show exponential growth as Facebook clearly does.