So Facebook pretty much missed the German market. There is StudiVZ which has about 10 times as many users in Germany than Facebook has, and which is sometimes called "red facebook" because of the similarities. Then there is "green facebook", Lokalisten, which had started quite regional (and invitation-only), but expanded since, and also is like 2-3 times the size of german Facebook.

So apaprently Facebook now decided they need to compete more in the German market, and started a marketing campaign. As part of this campaign, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, gave a talk in Berlin and Munich. The marketing company uses a strategy where they try to push these two cities to compete for having the largest fb userbase in Germany.

The talk was okay, I would have wished for more entrepreneural chat; but only a few of the questions were along these lines (e.g.: "when did you know you had something big?"), instead some usual feature requests came up ("Why can't I prevent others from tagging me on photos?")

But the largest kudos I have to give to facebook is for actually finding so many "ambassadors" that will do advertisement for them for free. Well, they got a T-Shirt (that does a word play on "blue" and "taking a day off", although it should probably say "I'm doing free promotion for fb and all I got is this T-Shirt")

It probably only works because Facebook on one hand has always been free, is a "hip web2.0 thing", and they're trying to play "good guys" just like Google does ("don't be evil"). Many people don't understand how despite the privacy functions in Facebook people can still get their data with just some old-style social engineering very easily (so no actual data manipulation or abuse required, but when you do it the right way, just about everybody on facebook will just give you his data voluntarily).

Sometimes all this Web2.0 fanboying can be quite scary, but I figure that is just the way people and societies work.

Catching up a bit (this was like three weeks ago):

The Google Developer Day in Munich in September. Lots of people there (500?). The event was mostly what you'd expect from Google (colors everywhere, geek toys around to play with, ...). Although I had expected that, I still was somewhat disappointed. The talks mostly covered APIs. Some at least showed demos of what is possible with the latest revisions, but some where a bit like "this is how you query the number of views for a YouTube video". For someone who has been using different APIs for years it's just much more convenient to look it up in the online documentation when needed.

But I don't blame Google for that; I think it was what many visitors expected. The reason I actually went there wasn't for the talks, but to talk to Google people, to maybe establish some link between the university and Google (however it seems that Google in Munich mostly does mobile stuff, which is not too relevant for our group).

On my parents' small laptop, Windows would just reboot. Even the repair functions of Windows would just reboot. No error message you could read, just reboot, repeat. Linux still worked fine (and my family is fine with using Linux, fortunately).

Linux also allowed us to quickly find out what is wrong with Windows: the hard disk is damaged (I like operating systems that give you useful error messages such as "Unrecoverable Error" on your harddisk). And most likely the laptop is out of warrenty since a month ago, as usual.

So I'm now investigating if the Linux partition also contains hardware errors, or if we might get away with just disabling Windows altogether for some time, until I get around to buy a replacement harddisk (and a replacement battery, too). So far, our experiences with Medion/Aldi/Tchibo have been rather bad. The TFT screen for the main computer is often flickering, but they failed to repair it in two attempts now. The MP3-CD-Player had stopped reading and the replacement didn't play MP3 at all. And the laptops batteries were crap (and why did they put in two small batterys instead of a reasonably sized one?), I know of a friend where the CD drive of that same model doesn't work anymore, and now our harddisk is dead with just some 11 days of use total (it was meant to be a portable system, and my parents have better computers for daily use at home).

If we buy a replacement, it will most likely be a so called "Netbook" with Linux preinstalled. These tiny systems often come preinstalled with Linux (because a Windows licence would increase the price by like 50%) and would fit our requirements pretty well. Not sure which one, though. Maybe an EEE.