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.