I thought I never used
Facebook in my life before and that I could live without it. I am at least
registered at
StudiVZ already, the primary social network in the german speaking area. And StudiVZ already sucks and is quite useless, so I thought after all the
bad things I've heard of Facebook I really don't need to get in touch with that thing at all. But looks like I am wrong: Because I didn't see Facebook in my life before, I - as well as about 90% of all other users as well - didn't realize that StudiVZ seems to be a perfect rip-off of Facebook - so I kind of used it already. Hilarious, just take a look at the images, the only difference seems to be the color (red vs blue):
Facebook (up) vs. StudiVZ (below), (source)
People are reporting that StudiVZ has exactly the same features as Facebook, and some paths of StudiVZ's PHP based implementation even seems to be named 'fakebook'. Well, Facebook already sued StudiVZ because of this right now (well, the real reason is of course because Facebook still has only 1 mio users vs. StudiVz's 6 mio users in this area). StudiVZ already replied that they still think it's ok what they are doing. Nothing unexpected from a company who
admonished other websites with the letters 'VZ' in their domain name for their 'mark' which wasn't even fully registered back then.
At least I knew it since then.