INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE -- Aug 7 -- Facebook sued the German leader in social
networking, StudiVZ. It contended that the company had illegally copied
Facebook's "look and feel" with similar graphics and features. What
Facebook did not mention, according to a former senior StudiVZ
executive, was that the U.S. company had been negotiating for months to
try to buy StudiVZ. Buying StudiVZ would strengthen Facebook in one
of the few
big Western markets in which it has not established a significant
presence. Facebook has more than 132m users worldwide, according
to ComScore. But StudiVZ, with 12.2m users in
Germany in June, is about 10 times the size of Facebook.de, the German
version of the service. FULL ARTICLE @ INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE