MeinVZ
» see meinvz.net as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obit ~
meinvz was the third network in the german VZ family. studivz launched in november 2005 for university students. schülervz followed in february 2007 for the school-age tier. meinvz arrived in february 2008 for everyone else, german-speaking adults who wanted the studivz feature set without needing to prove they were still enrolled somewhere.
at its combined peak in september 2009, the VZ networks claimed 15 million users across the whole DACH region. the whole DACH region was on some version of it. by 2010 the decline had already started. facebook opened its german-language interface in 2008 and the migration was steady after that.
i was not on the VZ networks. germany-facing social software rarely crossed the language line into turkey. hi5 was what people i knew tried around 2007 and quickly abandoned when facebook opened. meinvz sat in a linguistic bubble i could see from the outside but never sign into. the whole shape of it, the studivz-branded gruscheln poke button, the closed berlin-office culture, the eventual acquirer, is german internet history i learned by reading its obit.
~ the rap sheet ~
| Born | February 2008 in Berlin as the non-student VZ tier |
|---|---|
| Peak | roughly 15M combined VZ users across DACH in September 2009 |
| Killed | 31 March 2022, final shutdown of the whole VZ network |
| Lifespan | 14 years |
| Made by | Ehssan Dariani and Dennis Bemmann, VZnet Netzwerke GmbH |
| Killed by | facebook DACH expansion, then years of no maintenance |
~ the long decline ~
traffic entered a steady drop by late 2009 and never recovered. holtzbrinck, the media conglomerate that had acquired the VZ networks in 2007 for a reported €85 million, sold the whole thing in early 2017 to momentous entertainment for around €10 million. the new owner declared insolvency in september 2017. a rescue via poolworks GmbH kept the servers up for another five years but nothing new shipped. by 2020 studivz and meinvz were mostly running social casino games, not social networking.
~ what really happened ~
on 31 march 2022 the entire VZ network family went dark for good. the operators cited a technical stack too old to keep patching. all user data was deleted. schülervz had already been retired in 2013 after a data-breach scandal, but studivz and meinvz went out together on the same march night, seventeen years after studivz first opened.
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