I haven’t yet received a copy of the complaint and whether the issue concerning Facebook is the allegation of StudiVZ copying actual Facebook code or whether it considers its own “innovations” to be unique and not the natural product of providing this kind of technology. From my research, apparently both arguments were made. With the launch of Friendster in 2002 and MySpace in 2003,  it is clear that other social networks and communities existed well prior to Facebook in 2004. Can Facebook be the first “true” iteration of social networking and a protectible product innovation? Mark Zuckerberg forked over $65 million to make such an issue go away, accused of pilfering the idea from his employer and leaving to apply it to a larger audience.

But in this case, Facebook does make a point – with every new feature Facebook puts out, it seems that a similar feature finds its way into the StudiVZ and is this right? Is it actionable? Facebook originally filed a lawsuit in California, leading StudiVZ to file in a German court in the hope of obtaining a “declaratory judgment” and asserting that Facebook’s claims lacked merit. The German court’s reasoning for its decision was that StudiVZ was not trying to unfairly pass itself off as Facebook. When it was founded in 2005, Facebook was virtually unknown in Germany. Facebook announced plans to potentially file an appeal in a higher German court but would be limited to only providing new evidence – perhaps a comparison of php files (a popular web programming language) to show that there was a direct infringement of copyright.

So let’s get to the fun stuff – looking at German clones (not humans, web sites) of Internet social networking and user generated content innovations and whether StudiVZ really goes too far in resembling Facebook. (My opinion is that the red color is positively irritating on the eyes – but that goes hand in hand with the German concept of “schadenfreude” or the reveling in the pain of others!)

This article is “tell and show” – before letting you do the fun final visual comparison of StudiVZ to Facebook, we’ll list the German equivalents of popular US web sites:

YouTube  = Sevenload
MySpace = UndDu
Flickr = Photocase
del.icio.us = Mister Wong
Yelp = Qype
Facebook = StudiVZ
Digg = Yigg
Blogger and LiveJournal = blog.de and twoday.net
Meebo = Mabber
Etsy      Dawanda
Cafepress      Spreadshirt
Slide      imageloop
Flixster      MoviePilot
Twitter      Frazr, Wamadu, Sloggen

Perhaps another version in forest green would be nice?

As most should know who join virtually any dating site including match.com, the world’s largest online dating service, you can put up a profile but you have to pay to play. On match.com, paying to play is to the tune of approximately $20-40 per month, depending upon the length of time you subscribe and the options you choose. But you don’t have to pay to check out the service – and that is obvious instantly when you create a profile. But McGinn believes that match.com bears the responsibility – and fails to deliver – to differentiate between who is a paying subscriber and who is not. As such, a man can pay for membership and write to endless women whom he does not know are non-payment members who cannot reply, causing him wasted time and heartbreak.

“When a subscriber cancels their subscription, their profile continues to appear to be that of an active subscriber, nothing indicates to the viewer their limited access to read e-mails or respond to them… Match derives a benefit from giving members ‘matches’ who can’t reply because the notifications that someone has expressed interest in them induces some non-subscribers to subscribe in some cases.”

So if McGinn didn’t understand the way match.com works, wouldn’t the match.com folks have given him his 40 bits back and avoided a class action lawsuit? Probably… but for people like Mr. McGinn, apparently the deep rooted pain doesn’t end there.

“Match defrauds the consumer of his/her time, labor, and emotional investment… Match’s policy causes humiliation and disappointment for some members of the Class who feel rejected when their e-mails get no reply… causes severe emotional distress and anxiety for some members of the Class, including those who keep writing e-mails to one member after another and never hear back from any because he/she is writing to people who’ve cancelled. Because the writer has no way of knowing this, he or she may experience profound personal anguish, suffering which is easily preventable by Match.”

The next part of the brief does make a point but it misses the mark by a mile. A member is reported as “active” whether they login to cancel an account, deal with a billing issue, or something other than an intent to find a date. Is that deceptive? I’m not sure how anyone can differentiate the reason why someone logged into their account until after the deed is done. Additionally, how many times will a member log in to cancel an account? 23 times per month? There are some legitimate points about raising the activity level on match.com in order to entice membership, but nothing compelling.

Now here is the reason why this firm should have hired me to perform some expert review of their case and complaint, LOL! I observed that when a user merely reads a private email message sent from match.com, the act of viewing the email triggers the user’s online status to “active!” Now that is a significantly misleading and deceptive tactic which other users have already complained about prior – the misleading representation that someone is active or has “logged in” when they have not, in fact, logged in or performed any activity with relation to the service.

Let’s take an example where boy meets girl for the first time and likes her. While he doesn’t want to lose her and appear to be insincere, he still will review his emails from those who reply to his prior love missives but won’t login to start a new connection. Unbeknownst to him and probably most users, match.com will report him as “active” not just be replying to an email that runs through the match.com system, but merely opening an email message that could be an advertisement that he’d like to put in the trash, the likely result of code embedded invisibly in the email. When the girl logs in (or has a friend do so) to check on the sincerity of the boy, he appears to be checking out women every day while insisting that he prefers to see her exclusively. Now this deliberate attempt to mislead non-members into thinking that there are far more active users than actually appear is deceptive and match.com profits from this deceptive practice.

Match.com has been accused of fraudulent conduct before – in 2005 a lawsuit was filed against match.com and Yahoo, alleging that attractive employees were required to go out on a set number of dates with elegible single men. This lawsuit was later dropped. So what is going to happen now in 2009? It’s difficult to say, but if this is litigated, it will provide us with some case law on what is and what isn’t considered a deceptive practice in the shady practice of trying to lead web site visitors to the conclusion that more “action” is happening on a web site than is truly occurring in the hopes of coaxing another membership fee. At the very worst, it will be an exercise in entertaining courtroom fodder meeting reality TV as it will expose the life of the latest forlorn 40-something New York male looking for love in all the wrong places… the New York Southern District Court… and you can download the complaint against match.com here.

On May 12, Carroll reports that the servers now exist in two separate facilities, there are problems, but by the end of the day, a “major portion” of the servers will be under the same roof. Not quite sure what that means but on May 13, another update states that there are some expected glitches, and while some blogs appear to have been lost, all data is still intact and 3 move phases were completed. (How many phases were planned for this move?) At least there is a daily account. Forward to May 17 and the report is now that 2/3 of all the servers have been moved. So if you do the math, does that mean that there should be 12/3 more phases left? I’m not quite sure but, after all this time, it’s quite apparent that several people are going to need to find new jobs (and perhaps a good attorney.)

Complete silence for the next two weeks – that’s right, two weeks. Carroll announces on June 3 that the move was completed two days earlier and that the move of 900 machines has saved 50% of their rack footprint. The plan was apparently for “only five weeks” but the cost savings was well worth it, giving the company a serious chance to succeed moving forward. Sure there is some cleanup necessary but (wiping sweat from his brow), Carroll assures us all it was worth it and it’s Miller Time for the incredible Technorati Team. Not so fast, Dorion. Things still aren’t working properly (in fact, I can’t even properly complete the claim and setup of this blog as of June 14.)

It’s silence again, this time until June 12. Now we hear from Jen McLean, VP of Marketing. When reporting is passed to the marketing group, you know something serious is going on behind closed doors as the company seems to be moving the wash into full spin cycle (but is apparently still all wet.)

“It’s been a tumultuous month. For us – and unfortunately for you. We’re sorry for the frustration and the less than great service. While not an excuse, here is the reason:”

Yes, it has been a very tumultous month with numerous outages and problems… and absolutely no support for blog owners to have an idea of what is actually going on.  But wait a minute – didn’t we hear the reason for this move many weeks ago?

“We changed co-location facilities. We, well the four members of our ops team, moved 1,000 servers and ALL of our real-time search infrastructure. Things are now returning to normal, although slower than we would have liked.”

Quite a herculean effort!!  I think we went from 600 to 900 to over 1,000. Actually, I think Carroll’s exact words were “We have successfully moved nearly 900 machines…” just a few days earlier. Regardless, I don’t think many Technorati users want to hear what an incredible effort it has been – they just want to be able to gage expectations.

“We haven’t lost any data – so when things are back to normal your link counts and authority will be exactly where they should be.”

That’s great but you’ve been repeating yourselves for the past several weeks… two months on the Internet is like two centuries in dog years… or something like that.

“We’ll follow up in more detail so you have information on exactly which services have been affected and how, and when they’ll be completely functional again.”

I don’t know how to tell you this, Jen, but the problem is that all your users know the problems – what they need to know is an understanding of when there will be a solution! We certainly hope that the good folks at Technorati can finally get the service back to full working order. But these embarrassing and long lingering technical problems at Technorati and the complete abandonement of all support makes Twitter look like a fine tuned, well oiled machine. Point made. In the meanwhile, get this feed from Feed burner!