Mar

13

Digg is planning to expand to Germany

March 13, 2008 |

I missed this yesterday, but German business newspaper “Handelsblatt,” in an interview with Kevin Rose (Google translated site here), reports that Digg is planning to expand into the German speaking market within the next 12 to 24 months.

I would say it’s about time - after all, there are already various digg clones on the German market, including the most brazen of Digg clones - yigg - which actually started out as digg.de, but must have gotten some lawyerly letters about that. While yigg has neither the traffic nor the cloud of digg, even in Germany, it does have some nice features, such as a mapping function, automatic screenshots. At the same time, though, the comment features leave a lot to be desired.

I have noticed, though, that there seems to be quite some resistance in the German speaking world toward a lot of Web 2.0 sites, be it social media or blogs and podcasts, and a Germany version Digg might have trouble reaching critical mass, even with its global name recogniztion. On the other hand, there are about 100 million native speakers of German, so it’s definitely a market worth going after.

However, a really interesting analysis of Digg’s possibilities in Germany comes from German tech blogger Marcel Weiss on Neunetz.com (Google translate), who argues that Germany could use some fresh blood in the social media field and a site like Digg.de, which would have a constant need for new material, could be a catalyst for the development of a more active social media scene in Germany.

Gapingvoid-socialmedia

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Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. marcel weiss on March 14, 2008 4:36 am

    Thanks for mentioning me. :)
    With blogging in German it’s quite rare getting recognized in the englishspeaking blogosphere.

    However one minor correction from my site: my blogs TLD is actually .com not .de.
    (and you really don’t have to translate my familyname ^^)

  2. Frederic on March 14, 2008 9:31 am

    Marcel - sorry about that. It’s fixed now. I guess I wrote down your name from the translated site and didn’t think twice about it :)

  3. marcel weiss on March 14, 2008 11:55 am

    No problem, Frederic. Made me giggle. :)

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