Facebook saves a lot of money and time with their great idea to ask country specific users to translate the site step by step. "Be part of it!" ..and don't get paid!!! Great stuff. So, now it's translated and supposed to stir up a riot in the slightly boring German social network scene.

While many of us spend a fair amount of [working & networking] time on Twitter, Sphinn, Mixx, Current, Reddit, Pownce, Metafilter, LinkedIn, Naymz, Propeller, SumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Disinfo, BuddyMarks, Bumpzee, PPnow, SpotBack, VOX, Ning, Ma.Gnolia, Newsvine, TailRank, Humsurfer, Maholo, Subbmitt, Somehosthere, Drivl, Neatorama, Boing Boing, Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, the average German user's favorites are studivz.net, stayfriends.de and lokalisten.de. All these sites have in common that you can stalk people that you have been friends before at some point in your life and then befriend them again or, like studivz.net, let you communicate with other students in your area.

The German version of Myspace is since it's introduction in 2004 still going strong and attracts many times more users than any other social networking site in Germany. Sites like the German version of xing.com [a professional social network like LinkedIn] and niimo.com [like Twitter] can only dream of the user figures like these big players and crawl around at the bottom of the list.

So what will change with the recent introduction of the German Facebook version? For a start, the 430,920 already existing German members of Facebook.com [opposed to 8,377,540 Members in the UK and more than 18,000,000 in the USA] might want to move their accounts and friends to the German version. Plus, with a for German users optimized interface ["find old friends & fellow students, load up some pics - but nothing too fancy"] the site should finally take off and the Germans can quickly catch up with the slowly dying Facebook craze.

It's funny how the Germans completely missed the Facebook hype in the first place though. Probably because there was no optimized German version available ..and maybe because the German translation of Facebook is "Gesichtbuch" - which sounds like an illness.