Well, it looks like there are a fair number of German rip offs of Silicon Valley web applications.  Nick Gonzalez points out to a Geni-clone, called Verwandt, which, when compared screens to screens, looks so identical, it almost looks shameless.  I guess after this post, its unfair to be knocking Chinese … er, knock-offs, as I’m sure “Web2.0″ around the world probably means taking a look at innovation in the States and making a [insert a national/local/ethnic version] with the appropriate language and cultural changes.

Not knowing any other languages other than English does make it hard for me to find Web2.0 copy-cats, but my first experience with it was a Digg-clone, of which there are many, many, many of them  [Sorry, co-Rank -- "Digg" has become synonymous with social voting systems, almost, but not quite like Xerox with photocopying and Kleenex with paper tissue] with quite a few being Chinese versions.

Heck, I got dugg to the frontpage of a Chinese Digg about a year ago and wrote about it over here (abridged version: you don’t quite get the same Digg effect, to put it mildly).  At the end of the day, it does pose an interesting legal question for those companies State-side which make it big, as these smaller international versions are clearly unauthorized representations — or, the reverse: if any of these international sites *do* make it big, but the one in the States (the ‘original’) does *not*.  Does that make it ripe for copyright “trolling”?  And that’s besides the interesting look at why it did in one country and not another.

While the actual debate might be months (or years) away while the while web application milieu around the world matures, for the time being, I’ll keep my own faux outrage in check.  After all, that Chinese Digg that I hit the frontpage of?

It’s went into the international dead pool a long time ago. ;)