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Europe's Local Social Networks Before Facebook

Abstract

Before Facebook translated itself into their languages, most European countries had a home-grown social network that most of the country used. Germany had StudiVZ, the Netherlands had Hyves, Britain and Ireland had Bebo, Poland had Nasza-Klasa, Hungary had iWiW, Sweden had LunarStorm, Spain had Tuenti, France had Skyblog, and Russia had VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. In their home markets these were not niche products: Hyves reached a penetration of 68% in the Netherlands, iWiW was Hungary’s most visited website for five years, and more than half of Polish internet users visited Nasza-Klasa every month. Nearly all of them followed the same arc. They dominated locally between 2005 and 2010, sold themselves to a national media or telecom conglomerate at the peak, and were then overtaken by Facebook within about a year of it localizing. By 2014 most were dead or dying. The survivors were the ones Facebook never seriously localized against, or the ones that served a use Facebook ignored. In September 2026 Hyves came back under its old name, and a quarter of a million Dutch people signed up within a day.

The Pattern

The story repeats with small variations across the continent. A student or a small team builds a social network in one language for one country. It grows faster than anything the local internet has seen, because a social network is most useful when the people you already know are on it, and in a single country that saturation happens quickly. National press covers it as the local answer to the American web. A legacy media company or a telecom operator, watching internet advertising move away from its own properties, buys the network at or near its peak for a headline price. Then Facebook arrives in the local language, the graph stops respecting the border, and the users leave for the network their friends abroad are already on.

The buyers were almost always old-media or telecom incumbents: Holtzbrinck (a book publisher), Telegraaf Media Groep and ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL (broadcasters and newspapers), Telefónica and Magyar Telekom (phone companies), AOL (an American portal that had been a dial-up provider). The same miscalculation that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation made buying MySpace in 2005 played out a dozen times in Europe, described in The Social Media Revolution. An incumbent bought a fast-moving social product, slowed it down with acquisition-era caution and monetization, and watched a company that took no advertising revenue for years outrun it.

Germany: StudiVZ

StudiVZ went online on 11 November 2005 in Berlin, built by Ehssan Dariani, who had the idea and ran the company, and Dennis Bemmann, who wrote the software. The name was short for Studentenverzeichnis, a student directory, and the first target audience was the roughly 2.3 million students in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Lukasz Gadowski financed the start; the Samwer brothers and the Holtzbrinck publishing group came in as later investors.

The site was a close copy of Facebook, which at the time existed only in English and was aimed at North American students. The layout and the feature list followed the original, and Facebook’s “poke” became gruscheln, a contact feature Dariani devised whose name blends grüßen (to greet) and kuscheln (to cuddle). In November 2006, a year after launch, StudiVZ had about 950,000 users and was adding some 15,000 a day; in January 2007 Holtzbrinck bought it outright for roughly €85 million, one of Europe’s first large Web 2.0 acquisitions.

Security problems came with the growth. On 9 December 2006, 1,074,574 StudiVZ profiles were downloaded by an automated script; in February 2007 an attacker reportedly reached the database, and all member passwords were reset. In December 2007 the company introduced new terms of service and a privacy policy that allowed advertising targeted by age, sex, location, and field of study, and gave members until 9 January 2008 to accept or lose access. Users emptied their profiles in protest and the nickname “StasiVZ” spread. Within days StudiVZ dropped the planned SMS and instant-messenger advertising but kept the targeted advertising on the website; in February 2008 the Federation of German Consumer Organisations sent a formal warning over the single click that consented to every kind of data use at once.

Holtzbrinck extended the brand. schülerVZ for pupils had opened on 28 February 2007, and meinVZ, open to everyone, followed on 28 February 2008. Four days later, on 3 March 2008, Facebook launched its German version, translated by about 2,000 volunteer users in two weeks. Facebook then had about 600,000 members in Germany; by October 2008 it had 1.26 million. At their 2009 peak the three VZ networks together claimed more than 15 million registered members.

Facebook went to court over the resemblance. On 18 July 2008 it sued StudiVZ and the Holtzbrinck companies in California, and on 19 November 2008 it filed for an injunction at the Regional Court of Cologne. StudiVZ countered in Stuttgart. On 16 June 2009 the Cologne court dismissed Facebook’s claim: the similarities were obvious, the judges said, but when StudiVZ launched in November 2005 Facebook had not been well known enough in Germany for the copy to mislead anyone about its origin. On 10 September 2009 the two companies settled. StudiVZ paid Facebook an undisclosed sum, both sides withdrew their claims in the United States and Germany, and StudiVZ kept its design.

The next scandal ended in a death. In October 2009 a 20-year-old from Erlangen who had used a crawler to collect data from schülerVZ profiles, after defeating the site’s captchas, allegedly demanded money from the VZ operators and threatened to take the data to Eastern Europe. He was arrested in the company’s Berlin offices on 18 October 2009. On 31 October he was found dead in his cell at the Plötzensee youth detention centre; the Berlin justice administration said the circumstances pointed to suicide. In the same month the blog netzpolitik.org received more than a million records from schülerVZ profiles from another source.

The decline started in late 2009 and was steep. In October 2011 only 5.9 million of 16 million members were still active, and page views had fallen roughly 80% from the peak. Holtzbrinck had tried to sell the sites since 2011 and in September 2012 sold the operating company, Poolworks, to the American investment firm Vert Capital for an undisclosed price. schülerVZ shut down on 30 April 2013. The remaining sites changed hands again in 2017, the new owner filed for insolvency in September that year, a later investor pivoted the platform to social gaming, and StudiVZ finally went offline on 31 March 2022. Holtzbrinck had paid €85 million for a company that ended up being sold, eventually, for a small fraction of that.

Germany’s Other Networks

Lokalisten, founded in May 2005 and run from Munich, built its identity on regional connection rather than national reach. Its interface was written entirely in lowercase, and members gathered in regional “homebases”; most of them came from Munich, Augsburg, and Stuttgart. ProSiebenSat.1 bought 30% in October 2006 and another 60% in May 2008. The site recorded its highest traffic in October 2009 and had about 3.6 million registered members in July 2010. By June 2016 only 50,000 users were still active, and it closed on 30 September 2016.

wer-kennt-wen (“who knows whom”) went online on 3 October 2006, started by two students at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Fabian Jäger and Patrick Ohler. It reached its first million users on 2 December 2007. RTL interactive bought 49% in February 2008 and the rest in February 2009. It still had 9.6 million registered and 2.1 million active users in 2012 and 2013; a 2013 redesign that made it look more like Facebook drew heavy criticism from its members, and RTL switched off all functions at 9:20 a.m. on 2 June 2014. In September 2011, Facebook already had 37.6 million unique visitors in Germany against 8.0 million for the VZ networks and 5.2 million for wer-kennt-wen. The German market had already tipped.

Several older German networks served narrower purposes and outlived the champions. Knuddels, a chat community started as a student project in Karlsruhe on 9 September 1999, peaked at about 6.5 million registered users; after a 2018 breach of 1.8 million records with passwords stored unencrypted, it received a €20,000 fine from the Baden-Württemberg data protection authority, the first fine imposed in Germany under the GDPR. Jappy, launched in June 2001 from Hauzenberg in the Bavarian Forest as a dating site called Singletreffen.net, had about 1.5 million active users in 2013 and is still online. StayFriends, a Berlin site for finding former classmates and a subsidiary of the American Classmates.com from 2004, made money from paid “Gold” memberships rather than advertising and claimed more than 14 million entries in 2014; the advertising company Ströer bought it in 2016.

The Netherlands: Hyves

Hyves went online on 22 September 2004, founded by Raymond Spanjar, Koen Kam, and Floris Rost van Tonningen. The name came from beehives, after the domain hives.nl turned out to be taken. It had about 3,000 members in December 2004, one million in July 2005, and five million in December 2007. Members wrote krabbels (scribbles) on each other’s pages, gave respect where Facebook users would later give likes, decorated profiles with glitter images, and used an animated dancing banana among their emoticons. A “Gold” membership for about €25 a year, introduced in 2006, removed the advertising and raised the friend limit.

Dutch politics moved onto the site early. Wouter Bos, leader of the Labour Party, joined on 14 February 2006 as member number 1,655,850; Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende followed in May 2006, and Hyves hosted a chat debate between party leaders. By 2010 it had 10.6 million users and a penetration of 68%, one of the highest any of these networks achieved.

Telegraaf Media Groep, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, made Hyves a wholly owned subsidiary on 1 November 2010 for €43.7 million. Ten months later, in September 2011, Facebook drew more unique visitors in the Netherlands than Hyves for the first time. In March 2013 TMG wrote off €36 million of the goodwill. The closure was announced on 31 October 2013 and the social network shut down on 2 December 2013, leaving behind a games portal. Members could request a download of their profile during a two-week window in November. Around the shutdown, volunteers of Archive Team downloaded about 25 terabytes in ten days, covering some nine million profiles, and deposited them at the Internet Archive.

Britain and Ireland: Bebo

Bebo was founded in January 2005 in San Francisco by the married couple Michael and Xochi Birch, but its audience was in Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand. In July 2007 comScore counted 10.6 million unique visitors from the United Kingdom, narrowly ahead of MySpace with 10.1 million, which made Bebo the most visited social network in the country. It leaned towards teenagers and towards video: KateModern, a web series it co-produced in 2007, drew more than 60 million views.

In March 2008 AOL bought Bebo for $850 million; the Birches’ 70% stake earned them about $595 million. AOL sold Bebo on 17 June 2010 to Criterion Capital Partners for an undisclosed price that reports put at $10 million or less. Bebo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2013, and on 1 July 2013 the Birches bought it back for $1 million. Amazon’s Twitch bought the company in 2019 for $25 million; a relaunch as a social network in January 2021 never left beta and was shut down in 2022.

Belgium: Netlog

Netlog took the opposite route to most of its peers. Lorenz Bogaert and Toon Coppens started it in Ghent in 1999 under the name ASL.TO; it became Redbox in 2002, also ran as Facebox, and was renamed Netlog after it expanded abroad from 2005. Instead of serving one country it translated itself into more than twenty languages, with 28 million members by 2007 and a claimed 94 million at its height. Being multilingual did not save it. In January 2011 Netlog announced that it would become part of Massive Media, which also ran the dating site Twoo; by 2015 its homepage pointed to a merger with Twoo, and the old site was out of service. In July 2018 former users were notified that the database of members registered before December 2012 had been breached.

The Nordic and Baltic Networks

LunarStorm in Sweden was older than any of them. Its predecessor StajlPlejs, created by Rickard Eriksson, went online around 1996, and LunarStorm itself opened on 1 January 2000. It was a teenage network: about 70% of its members were between 12 and 17. In 2007 it had 1.2 million members, and up to about 100,000 of them were logged in at the same time. By 2009 the number of concurrent users had fallen to about 1,500, and the site closed on 18 August 2010 “due to lack of activity.”

IRC-Galleria in Finland began in December 2000 as a photo gallery for users of the Finnish IRC channels, created by Tomi Lintelä and Jari Jaanto. Sulake, the company behind Habbo Hotel, bought it in 2007 for €12.5 million paid in its own stock, which never became publicly traded. The site had more than 500,000 registered users in 2009; in 2014 some of its creators and early employees bought it back, and it still runs. Draugiem.lv in Latvia, founded on 24 April 2004 by Lauris Liberts and Agris Tamanis, reached a million users in 2007 and also remains online.

Poland: Nasza-Klasa

Nasza-Klasa (“our class”) launched on 11 November 2006, built by Maciej Popowicz and three fellow computer-science students at the University of Wrocław. Its premise was reunion rather than status: find the people you went to school with. That framing made it spread through age groups the American networks were not reaching. In 2009 it had 13.5 million active users, and more than half of Polish internet users visited it every month.

The turn came from the owners, not from Facebook first. On 22 June 2010 the site was renamed nk.pl, and existing users had to accept new terms of service that let the company use their profile photo and name commercially, including in advertising. The change set off a public backlash and an exodus of accounts, at the same time as the site pushed paid features and games bought with a virtual currency. By August 2014 the number of registered users had dropped below 7 million, most of the departed having moved to Facebook. The closure was announced on 26 May 2021, and the site went dark on 27 July 2021.

Hungary: iWiW

iWiW was the oldest of the Central European group. Zsolt Várady, a web developer, launched it as WiW on 14 April 2002, which makes it one of the earliest social networks anywhere, a contemporary of Friendster and Ryze. Renamed iWiW, it was the most visited Hungarian website from 2005 to 2010, with about 1.5 million members logging in every day. Its registered membership reached 4.7 million in January 2012, in a country of under ten million people, by which time Facebook had already matched its daily logins.

Magyar Telekom, the national telecom operator, owned it at the end through its subsidiary Origo. The shutdown was announced on 15 May 2014, and iWiW went dark on 30 June 2014. Members could download their messages, pictures, and contacts as a zip file until 25 June; no public archive of the site was made.

Spain and France

Tuenti, founded in Spain on 22 February 2006 by a group including Zaryn Dentzel, who had first come to Spain as an exchange student, was invite-only and aimed first at university students, which earned it the label “the Spanish Facebook.” It reached 15 million registered users and was the most popular social network among young Spaniards from 2009 to 2012. On 4 August 2010 the telecom operator Telefónica bought an 85% stake for €70 million and steered the company toward telecommunications, launching it as a mobile virtual network operator in February 2012. As the product’s focus shifted to selling phone plans, the social network faded against Facebook and Instagram; its active base fell from around 15 million in 2011 to about 300,000 by 2016, when the remaining social features apart from chat were removed and Tuenti continued only as a mobile brand.

Skyblog, launched in December 2002 by Pierre Bellanger of the rap radio station Skyrock, was more a blogging platform than a profile network, but it filled the same social role for a French-speaking generation. By June 2008 the Skyrock network ranked as the world’s seventh-largest social network with over 21 million visitors. France was one of the clearest head-to-head cases. Facebook added French in February 2008; in December 2008 comScore counted 12 million French visitors to Facebook against 11 million to Skyrock, a year in which Facebook’s French audience grew by 443% and Skyrock’s by 8%. Skyblog kept running long after relevance left it and went offline only on 21 August 2023. On the day it closed, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel announced that they would archive about 12 million skyblogs, a better fate than most of its peers received.

Russia: VKontakte and Odnoklassniki

Russia is where the local networks won. Odnoklassniki (“classmates”) launched in March 2006 as a hobby project of Albert Popkov, a telecommunications specialist living in London, with the same reunion premise as Nasza-Klasa. VKontakte (“in contact”) followed, founded in Saint Petersburg by the brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov; it went into beta in September 2006 and dates its founding to 10 October 2006. VKontakte reached a million users in July 2007 and ten million in April 2008, and in December 2008 it overtook Odnoklassniki as Russia’s most popular social network. Odnoklassniki, which in October 2008 began charging new members an SMS fee to activate their accounts, dropped the fee by August 2010.

Both ended up under the same investor. Digital Sky Technologies, later Mail.ru Group, bought a controlling interest in Odnoklassniki in 2008 and a growing stake in VKontakte from 2007. Pavel Durov was removed as VKontakte’s chief executive on 21 April 2014 and left Russia; in September 2014 Mail.ru bought the remaining 48% and became sole owner. Facebook never built a Russian presence to match either network, and both are still running.

Why the Local Networks Lost

Three forces broke the same way in every country where Facebook competed seriously. First, the buyers. Selling to a broadcaster, publisher, or phone company put the network under owners who wanted predictable advertising or telecom revenue and applied the caution of a mature business to a product whose value depended on speed. StudiVZ and Nasza-Klasa both lost users directly to owner-driven changes in monetization and terms of service, and Tuenti was turned into a phone company.

Second, the graph crossed the border. A single-country network is strongest exactly until the moment people want to reach friends, relatives, and colleagues in other countries. Facebook’s advantage was not features; it translated into dozens of languages and let a Dutch user, a German user, and a Spanish user share one network. Once Facebook localized, the national champion’s core strength, that everyone in the country was on it, was matched and then exceeded by a network on which everyone abroad was too. Netlog shows that translating alone was not enough: it was multilingual from 2005 and lost anyway.

Third, the data mostly did not survive. When these sites closed, the profiles, photos, and group histories rarely moved anywhere. iWiW left no public archive; Skyblog, archived by France’s national library, is the exception. Hyves offered a two-week download window, and most of what remains of it exists because volunteers copied it in ten days around the shutdown. The communities that had been the reason to use Nasza-Klasa or the VZ networks did not transfer to Facebook; users started over. Compare Link Rot and the Digital Dark Age, Content Moderation, and the fate of Orkut, Google’s own social network that thrived in Brazil and India and then vanished the same way.

The survivors avoided the head-on fight. Germany’s Xing held on as a business-contacts network, a use Facebook did not target. Knuddels, Jappy, and StayFriends kept smaller audiences with chat, dating, and school reunions. IRC-Galleria and Draugiem.lv served small language markets, and VKontakte and Odnoklassniki kept a home market where Facebook never localized deeply.

The Comebacks

On 22 September 2026, almost thirteen years after it closed, Hyves went back online under the Belgian media group Mediahuis, which had taken over Telegraaf Media Groep in 2017. About 250,000 people signed up within a day, and the operators had to admit new members from a waiting list. The new Hyves brought back krabbels, respect, glitter images, and the dancing banana, showed posts in chronological order without a recommendation algorithm, and advertised itself as built on European infrastructure. Nothing from the old site came back: profiles, friends, photos, and krabbels from 2004 to 2013 were gone, and everyone started from zero.

Two weeks later, on 8 October 2026, Orkut Büyükkökten asked people to register at orkut.com to show demand for a revived Orkut, and said more than 255,000 had done so; no product or launch date was announced. Bebo had tried the same in 2021 and closed again within about a year.

📚 Sources