Although Germany happened to be one of those countries where the Web 2.0 or Social Web phenomena caught on pretty late making its entrance in the period between 2006 and 2007, the country is playing quick catch up and quite a lot of Web 2.0 apps now abound in the German web traffic. From the media to entrepreneurs and otherwise everyday users of the internet, the social web has caught on really big in Germany. There quite a lot of German online networks covering news, entertainment, shopping, online collaboration and so many other areas.
Some of the most active and interesting Web 2.0 apps that were in the forefront of awakening the interest of the German internet community to social web services are quickly reviewed below.
Luupo
Luupo is a Web 2.0 app that approaches shopping in a very novel way. Members of the site purchase points on the network and use such points to bet on available products. The price of the product is hidden from all bettors and every time there is a bet on the product the price is reduced by 0.40 Euros. The winning bet is the bet that finally knocks the price of the product down to zero Euros.
Amiando
Amiando is a social service that works great for organizing events, sending out online invites and creating an efficient ticketing service for the events. The site has great designs that users can make use of in addition to allowing them sell the tickets online. Amiando can be used for organizing carpools, uploading pictures of events and also event organizers can make use of discussion boards to get feedback from their participants.
Weblin
The Weblin service is a chat app and already has investments from organizations such as T-Online Venture Fund, High Tech Gründerfonds and Mountain Partners who are interested in its Avatar service. Weblin is installed as a plug-in for internet browsers after which the user gets a unique avatar which is made visible to other users of Weblin for initiating online chats.
Mymuesli
Mymuesli allows users to make their own Müsli” and with the possibility of being able to mix close to 566,000,000,000,000,000 types of different Müslis, the service will be of great use to Müslis lovers.
Guut
Guut is a live shopping service that was launched in September 2007 and has continued to grow since. It has a great online community and the pricing system is also very good.
Yigg
Yigg is more of a clone of the digg social news app. The service has quite a large database of online news items and their user base is ever expanding.
Mister Wong
Mister Wong is the most popular bookmarking app on Germany’s social online network and they currently have more than 3.3 million online bookmarks.
SpreadShirt
For creating custom T-shirts, SpreadShirt is Germany’s application of choice. The company also has an international reach and is the largest service in Germany for customizing T-shirts.
StudiVZ
StudiVZ is developed basically as a clone of the Facebook application but its own target audience is mostly students. The social service has a wide user base and was acquired sometime ago by Holzbrinck for a price of € 80 million.
The demographic circle for Xing is largely constituted of professionals and other business executives. The service which was formerly known as openBC became public around December 2006 and currently enjoys huge patronage for a large number of users spread across Europe.