Facebook fends off attack of the clones by Radka Konkolova

Today’s people probably need for their lives something different and special. I mean everybody wants to meet other people and is more pleasant, easier and more comfortable doing this via Internet. And the consequence is, you can have friends all over the world and maybe sometimes you can visit foreign country in order to meet your pen pal. Of course it is sometimes bit risky. But in the other hand it is not necessary to meet person you are writing to.

So thanks to this there are still more and more networking sites in almost every country of the world. Some of them are made in the way to connect people from one country, one town or one school. You can find plenty of friends there. For example there exist few sites dedicated for students from universities. So you can meet your "classmates” there at first and there in real.

But there are of course many sites for every age group. The strongest and widely spread is Facebook. Although it includes probably majority of members from all such sites, but its managers are still not as satisfied. The problem is, that at first it was dedicated only for English speaking countries, so people from other parts of the world were separated and hadn’t got such possiblity. And some people, engineers and programmers from those countries decided to change this and their made up their own sites. But, unfortunately, those sites are just clons of original Facebook. This has happened in Germany as well in Russia and certainly in many other countries. So Facebook filed an intellectual-property lawsuit against German clone StudiVZ in a federal court in California.

I think it is pretty good that creators from non-English speaking countries have allowed people to join in such sites and share their „things“ and affairs, but on the other hand I can’t understand why they couln’t make some changes in the appearence at least. They wouldn’t have problems with Facebook and rules but vice versa they would be original, because there was no Facebook at the beginning. So Facebook didn’t want competitors and couldn’t stay them so it started to do its campaign last year, what means that site is now accessible for people from other countries including also their language, so there is for example also Czech or Norwegian version of this networking site.

But also people in Russia have needed something like that, because they wanted to join in such network. It could be also because there are about 142 million people living in this world biggest country who want to be in touch with their friends more often. So of course there are also many young people who have wanted to use such site, maybe only from the curiosity. And because Facebook had faltered, Russian made up Vkontakte. Essentially it is Facebook’s clon, only one difference is, that it is in Russian. But this site is really very successul while it has got approximately 14 million members. It is completely the same, but some people from Russia know only Vkontakte and they have never heard about Facebook, what sounds little bit funny for me, but it doesn’t matter.

I am bit curious about how it will look like with Facebook in the close future, because there are certainly many countries, which it wants to reach but which have already had their own networking sites. And although Facebook is very big and strong, I think it is impossible to achieve members from those clons...

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_hi_te/facebook_clones;_ylt=AjM67iRf35WEe76jzw6rINCs0NUE

by Radka Konkolova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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edited by Beata Biskova