FORBES -- June 12 -- If users aren't
satisfied to merely create a Facebook profile, Agriya Infospace, based
in Chennai, India, offers another option: Create your own Facebook.
Agriya sells what it calls "Kootali," a $400 software package that
lets developers replicate Facebook's design and features, complete with
friend networks, photos and "mini-feeds"--even Facebook's font. Their
customers, mostly unknown sites like Faceclub.com and
Umicity.com, don't pose much of a competitive threat to Facebook. But,
according to Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Agriya's
cloning software represents a more general problem for Facebook: that
any skilled developer can recreate the site's basic social networking
functions.
Facebook Copycats Abroad
StudiVerzeichnis, German for "Student Index", have gathered around 6m registered users.
VKontakte, is with 4.5m unique visitors a day and 13.3m registered
users, the most popular site in Russia
Chinnese Xiaonei claims to have received around 15m unique visitors in
April
The
copycats' explosive growth comes at a time when Facebook seems to be
exploring its own international offshoots but the clones may have
already saturated some international
markets. In China, Xiaonei
has already registered more than 90% of college students. Wang Xing,
who created Xiaonei in 2005, admits that the site's
design was originally "borrowed" from Facebook. Asked if he feels any
compunction about taking features wholesale
from Facebook, Wang points to Mark Zuckerberg's own copycat
problems. Since 2004, the owners of rival site ConnectU have claimed
that Zuckerberg stole intellectual property from their social network
while working as a software developer for the site.
FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
