Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 12, 2008 – 4:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Youthwatching ‘09 is a Belgian conference about youth culture. Luckily, they realize that such a conference is a pure fake when they’re no youngsters around. Thus they’ve invited young lads and girls to the give a short presentation about their projects and dreams.
Turns out that some guys have really noble goals in mind. Toon and Bert hate the taboo on masturbating girls. To combat this general perception, they’ve started an online initiative called WeMasturbate. With pages on MySpace and Netlog plus stickers, t-shirts, and buttons in the off line world they gain attention for their cause:
Boys masturbate and can talk and show off about it. But when it comes to girls and masturbation, ieeeuw.
The guys believe in positive discrimination, so only girls are allowed to befriend them. So far, 14332 Netlog chicks have joined their cause. Netlog founder Lorenz Bogaert also gave a presentation during Youthwatching and he advised Toon and Bert to expand their business to Turkey, where in a recent research 42 percent of the youngsters acknowledged they had stripped in front of a webcam.
I felt pretty dull when I had to give my talk about problogging…
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 27, 2008 – 11:55 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Netlog, Europe’s social network darling, will announce at Google I/O tomorrow that OpenSocial support is on its way. Technical director Folke Lemaitre just said this at Kings of Code, a web developer conference in Amsterdam.
Although the official announcement will be made at Google’s largest developer gathering in San Francisco tomorrow, coders can already play with the new application possibility on this page. The public launch will be in June. When Lemaitre asked the Kings of Code crowd who already has developed an OpenSocial app, only one hand was raised. As you can imagine, he stressed that “everybody should now develop lots of OpenSocial applications”.
Netlog is still going strong. Although they had a small dip a few weeks ago, the number of members is growing rapidly. “The dip was caused by a failure in our private messaging application. It’s interesting to see what the influence of one single tool is”, Lemaitre told the audience. Other numbers are impressive as well, Netlog now has 35 million unique members and four billion page views per month. Moreover, the Belgium-based social network supports 19 languages and has more coming up. Oh and by the way, they sponsor our blog too. And that’s just one of their many smart strategic moves.
Written on April 5, 2008 – 5:57 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Thanks for your great feedback yesterday! I’m really glad to hear that you guys had a good time and were inspired by the speakers and other attendees. Like I said yesterday, this blog will continue to report on European Web 2.0 news. Yet before we continue, I’d like to give you an overview of the posts we’ve written the last couple of days. So you can sit back, relax and relive the conference.
Keynotes
Adeo Ressi knows how to get funding
Gil Penchina: “Give your customers insane levels of control”
Khris Loux “Bloggers and startups, challenge the big companies and embrace open standards”
Leah Culver and the magical unicorn: A Pownce story
Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
Robert Scoble about social media: “The first experience is a crappy experience”
Werner Vogels: “Everything fails all the time”
Garrett Camp: “one-size-fits-all in search is history”
Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”
On the couch interviews
Kevin Rose: ‘Digg will soon start suggesting stories’ (this one made it to the Digg frontpage!)
Khris Loux interviews Chris Saad about Dataportability
Interviews by David - the man with the kilt - Petherick
Robert Scoble
Werner Vogels
Start-up rounds
1: CoComment, eBuddy, fav.or.it, Wauw, IntroNiche and Empressr
2: Netlog, Webnode, Lookery, Zilok, Radionomy and Wakoopa
3: Bemba, Backbase, andUNite, Twingly, Ubervu, ConfNetwork and a ‘warm body’
4: Symbaloo, Beezbox, Goojet, Hoera, Soocial, Locle and David Hasselhof
Media
1339 Flickr photos tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
213 blog posts tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
YouTube videos
Written on March 3, 2008 – 5:05 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As the major social networks are working their way into Europe, interesting news about localization features keep popping up my feed reader and mail inbox. The two major headlines today: Facebook launches a German version and LinkedIn is partnering up with a big French job listing service.
The one million German speaking Facebook users now have access to an interface in their own language. I’m sure they appreciate that, since the German voice-over business has been a booming industry since the rise of television. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that 2000 German users voluntarily fixed the translating job in less than two weeks.
It’s only the third language version of Facebook. The choice for a German version is kind of weird if you consider the fact that Germany or other German speaking countries are not listed in the top 10 countries for Facebook users. After the United States, Britain is number two with 8 million active users and Canada is third with 7 million users. Turkey is fourth, followed by Australia, France and Sweden. So if you just consider the user numbers, Turkey would have been a more logical choice. Yet Germans have more money to spend, and in that light, a French version will probably be next.
In that country, LinkedIn did a pretty good job expanding their market reach. TechCrunch reports that they partnered up with Apec.fr, a job listing site that claims they have about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies. Those users can now register for LinkedIn and start using the service without leaving the French interface of Apec. If I were working at European LinkedIn competitors Viadeo and Xing, I’d be scared.
The way LinkedIn and Facebook approach Europe - just offer language support - is pretty effective. One of Europe’s largest social networks Netlog can certainly confirm that. They hired two two Turkish students to translate the service for a 1000 dollars. It took the students a week, four months later the Turkish version had 2.5 million users.
Yet I prefer the MySpace approach. They are already based in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in Russia and Turkey. When they launch, they install a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Read this post by Patrick de Laive about possible Facebook acquisitions in Europe.
Written on December 27, 2007 – 10:41 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week we wrote about Netlog, a successful European Social Network that lets members translate its service into different languages. They are currently offering 8 different local versions of their service and is close to reaching 30 million members and 4 billion page views every month. They built a Turkish version in less than a week which grew to 2.5 million members in only four months.
It seems that Facebook came to the same solution recently when it was searching for a way to start offering localized versions of its service. Mashable reports that Facebook will launch a new app titled Facebook Translations (link wasn’t active when I published this!) that will help members translate Facebook into different languages. Facebook wants to make Facebook “available to everyone, everywhere, in all languages”.
They claim to have more than 800 translators working on several different languages right now. In recent years we have noticed that simply translating a service isn’t enough to claim a local market and users often prefer an existing local product over an imported and translated foreign one. Still, Facebook is not just a social network but a great platform with more benefits that just networking.
It is going to be an exciting year for European Social Networks as Facebook comes available in more languages.
Written on December 17, 2007 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last week, General Manager of VC LGiLab Ouriel Ohayon announced an investment in Bahu, a European social network for young students across Europe. Bahu (French slang for High School) is focusing on promoting talents and mainly popular in the south and east of Europe. Only four months after they launched they’d already welcomed a stunning amount of 2 million unique visitors from 6 different countries. Bahu is another chapter in a book about successful European social networks. And trust me, it’s a big book.
Consider Hyves for example. Launched by a group of friends in October 2004, aiming at the Netherlands, a country with only 16 million citizens. Earlier this month they threw a party because they counted five million users. Four million of them are Dutch.
You want another example? No problem! Let’s go south of the Netherlands: Belgium. This even smaller country is home to Netlog, an extremely successful social network that is offering 8 different languages for its 29.8 million users and counts 4 billion page views every month. When Netlog wanted to expand in Turkey, they hired two students to translate the site for 1000 dollar. It took them a week and four months later the Turkish version has 2.5 million users.
The big question is: how do all those European networks, despite the Facebook and MySpace hegemony, manage to attract so many users? There seems to be no space for competitors in the US, but there most definitely is in Europe.
The answer to that question is actually quite simple. Whereas Americans just use one global network, Europeans also use a local version. If I look at my own social network usage, I use Hyves for my Dutch friends and Facebook for the contacts I’ve met during
international seminars and conferences. A lot of my friends and colleagues do the same thing. It’s exactly that kind of usage that adds pages to the Big Book of Successful European Social Networks.
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