The Samwer brothers, the well-known European trio of entrepreneurs, have invested in Frazr, an exact duplicate of Twitter.
They have thus embarked on a reputation of backing blatant rip-offs of successful U.S. companies. They backed Studi-VZ, the Facebook in Germany, for example, in 2005, shortly after Facebook became a major success.
See the images below to see how similar Frazr is to Twitter. Even the question at the top of the pages is same. Here’s a translation of the German: “Everyone wants to know: What are you doing? Tell them. On the Web, in a message, or phone.” Compare that to Twitter’s intro.
Frazr is available in French and German. The amount invested was undisclosed.
Twitter, a San Francisco company, has gained tremendous buzz in tech circles in recent weeks, for the dead-simple way it lets you publish one-liners about what you are doing at any given time. You can select the people you want updates from, to track what your friends are doing, for example. Some techies find Twitter might make for a new type of communications protocol (scroll down). Others think the hype will die off within a few weeks or months. Still, all sorts of mashups have been built to integrate Twitter into things like maps and browsers. Twitbin, for example, gives you a way to follow twitters in your browser sidebar.
Alexander, Oliver und Marc Samwer aren’t dumb. U.S. companies take a while before they focus on foreign markets. And Europeans are more likely to rally behind a local company that specializes in their language. The brothers invested through their European Founders Fund. Christian Vollmann, of Magic Internet, is also an investor in Frazr, according to the German publication OnetoOne.
In fact, more European clones of Twitter have popped up: They include Texeln, another exact replica of Twitter, along with Wamadu, Faybl, 1you and Sloggen. Partnr.de is about to launch, according to OnetoOne.
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15 Comments
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Hank said:
For Twitter model, I am not sure how many people can read tons of messages for one month.
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Jott said:
using Twitter is wasting Time, this horrible clone makes it all worse…
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Martin Edenström - www.what.se said:
C’mon, invest in this?
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Manuel said:
Yes, Frazr is a exact duplicate of Twitter. But there are even more copy cats. Not only germany. Even in spain, russia an italy.
To time germany has 7 Twitter-Clones … look here:
http://neinjaerledigtlos.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/die-deutschen-twitter-clone-%e2%80%93-eine-liste/
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Kingsley said:
Twittr clones are a great idea because texting is the primary medium for spontaneous communication everywhere else in the world, and twittr seems to have made very little headway in this market.
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Twitter Forums said:
Yes the question is how many twitter services can the market support?
We linked back to your article in our blog. The Twitter community and forums.
http://www.twittown -
Nick said:
This reminds me of another German company that blatantly rips-off designs and ideas in the pro audio industry called Behringer.
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Samuel said:
Yes indeed - posting 128 characters of ASCII text onto a website in a list — uh huh, what an incredibly powerful idea i cant believe someone had the brass nuts to copy it
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thw said:
I have made a Twitter-clone/twitter-like sites collection,7 from German ,3 from Japan,2 from China.and more from other countries,check at
http://www.thws.cn/article.asp?id=1366 -
Tiny Url said:
Seems twitter.com better internationalize quickly.
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John said:
Please add this
http://twoggle.com -
Gert said:
another (but BETTER) clone of twitter:
http://twoggle.com -
Ben Kingsley said:
Hi there…Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts..what a nice Thursday
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jansegers said:
I’ve just joined twoggle.com ; thanks for mentionning it !
I’m going to promote this article and the comments throughout the blogosphere…
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Kameir said:
Social plays are not about technology but execution.
13 Trackbacks
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Pocket.Net - Mobile 2.0 : Samwer Brothers Back Frazr—German Twitter said:
[...] are more likely to rally behind a local company that specializes in their language” reports VentureBeat. The Samwer brothers also backed Studi-VZ, a Facebook-style service in Germany. It’s going to be [...]
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Exposed: The 7 Most Blatant Web 2.0 Rip Offs said:
[...] and German (“was machst Du?”). Not much activity to report yet on the site, but they just received funding, so be on the look out for lots of Euro [...]
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proxieslist.net said:
[...] and German (“was machst Du?”). Not much activity to report yet on the site, but they just received funding, so be on the look out for lots of Euro [...]
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TechCrunch en français » Frazr la copie européenne de Twitter illustre la nécessité de développer rapidement votre concept à l’étranger said:
[...] Matt Marshall le constate le site a été copié jusque dans son message d’accueil (“Everyone wants to know: What are [...]
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Frazr la copie européenne de Twitter illustre la nécessité de développer rapidement votre concept à l’étranger by e5k said:
[...] Matt Marshall le constate le site a été copié jusque dans son message d’accueil (“Everyone wants to know: What are [...]
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VentureBeat » Jimdo lets you create a website, or clone someone else’s said:
[...] German, and Chinese. Some might want to throw Jimdo into the “German clone” bucket with Verwandt, Frazr, and the like, but its look and feel are differentiated enough to avoid that label. It has raised only a small [...]
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出家如初，成佛有余 » 关于web2.0开源项目的汇总帖子 said:
[...] to the concept in positive ways for users (read our review). Some copycat sites, on the other hand, are more shameless in their [...]
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Phoenomi - Surfing the Longtail » Blog Archive » International Web 2.0 clones said:
[...] five months, 4.5 million more profiles than Geni). German copycats are nothing new as you can read here and here. There are at least two lessons to learn from this article: genealogy on the web is [...]
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