Germany 2.0 – My Top 10 Social Web Players

The Social Web or Web 2.0 virus had finally hit Germany in 2006/2007, a bit later than in many parts of the world. Currently everybody in Germany – users, VCs, entrepreneurs and the media – is going wild for the social web. We’ve got social bookmarking, news, shopping, collaboration, networks and communities. Everything and everybody seems to be going social.

I’ve got the great opportunity to introduce you to some of the most interesting, fastest growing, best performing or best thinking Web 2.0 services from Germany. As there are probably more than a thousand social web services in Germany right now, I had to focus on some of them and so I picked my Top 10 Social Web players from Germany. I’ve sorted the list in reverse-traffic size order.

Luupo

Luupo is a very exciting social shopping service with an original business idea. Users can buy "luupo points" and bet them on products. With each bet the hidden product price lowers by € 0.40. The user that bets the product down to € 0 wins the product. You can also buy products. Great team and already 10,000+ users after only 5 months.

Amiando

Amiando is a great online invitation, event organization and ticket service. Choose a design, create an invitation text, add the participants’ eMail addresses, let the participants organize carpools, open a discussion board, sell tickets, upload party photos after the party etc. More than 100,000 users so far and several thousand events each month. A lot of my friends are already using amiando to organize their parties and events.

Weblin

After installing weblin as a browser plugin, you get an avatar that makes you visible for other weblin users while visiting a website which you can use to chat. Recently Mountain Partners and "High Tech Gründerfonds" another big player – T-Online Venture Fund have invested in the avatar service.

Mymuesli

mymuesli is an online shop for "user-generated Müsli". How genius is this idea?! Mix up to 566,000,000,000,000,000 different Müslis from all the available ingredients and make yourmuesli. Over 20,000 users to-date and € 125,000 turnover within 5 months.

Guut

Guut is one of the fastest growing live shopping services from Germany. Launched in the beginning of September 2007, the woot-clone has already attracted approximately 10,000 users and made € 180,000 in sales in its third month. The product selection, community spirit and pricing are its biggest attractions.

Yigg

Yigg is the largest digg-clone social news service from Germany. As of October 2007 they have more than 250,000 news items online, 12,000 users, 2.2million unique visitors and 50 million page views per month.

Mister Wong

Mister Wong is Germany’s most popular social bookmarking service. Over 3.3 million bookmarks online.

SpreadShirt

SpreadShirt is Germany’s largest and hippest T-Shirt customizer from Germany with a lot of international "arms". 250 employees, 300,000 shop partnerts and approximately 30,000 t-shirt designs submitted per week.

StudiVZ

Germany´s No. 1 Facebook clone has specialized on students. More than 4 million users make it the biggest social network in Germany and a must-have for any social networker. StudiVZ was acquired by Holzbrinck for € 80 million beginning of this year.

Xing

Xing is the most popular social network for business professionals. Currently more than 4.5 million users mainly from Europe with a majority from Germany. 100 employees from 21 nations. Formerly known as openBC, Xing went public in December 2006.

These are my personal choices — who would you add or delete from the list?

This article was authored by Tim Rohrer, 27, from Munich, Germany. He is working as an online marketing freelancer and has several projects including: Zpeech, Leselupe, Guut-insider and his newest site, 100wortereporter. Tim also closely follows the great internet ideas coming from the US market.