Karl-Heinz Wenzlaff has released a list of the most popular social networks in Germany. There are certainly some surprises in the list.

StudiVZ, Myspace, ICQ are dominating the German Alexa-traffic, with Facebook catching up. With the strong user base of StudiVZ I can only wonder whether they only receive more users or whether the users are using StudiVZ more often.

MySpace, ICQ, Facebook are increasing more popular because they seem to have crossed the Tipping Point in Germany recently or already a long time ago. What will happen to StudiVZ once Facebook becomes very popular, nobody knows so far. Large numbers of German students are now migrating from StudiVZ to Facebook and I would assume that the same is true for other countries as well.

A smightly smaller number is migrating from the German Xing to Facebook. Linkedin is still not popular in Germany, even though it is receiving more attention in the US/UK, Eastern Europe and in Russia. Xing has made a big jump in page impressions in Germany and we will soon whether they expansion strategy works.

Lokalisten.de is certainly not a newcomer in Germany and seems to be growing at some speed. Growing even faster is Netlog, a Belgian social network which is a combination of MySpace and Facebook. With more than 1.8 million users in Germany and more than 26 million users in Europe, it has grown a strong user base as well.

More surprisingly, Netlog is surpassed by other social networks aimed at flirting and dating. Jappy is a network for singles and has only 500,000 users, but strong community interaction (such as stories and strong support, even a Wiki for its users. Kwick has 1 Million Users, also combines features from MySpace and Facebook and organizes its users into clans.

Knuddels has 2.4 million users but focuses on chatrooms and picture rankings. Wer-kennt-wen.de has profited from its highly mnemonic domain (who-knows-whom) but seems to be focused in Western Germany. Other flirting communties such as Gayromeo, Flirtfever and AdultFriendfinder don’t hide their intentions, but rank at the lower end of the Top 100.

With Livejournal and Odnoklassniki.ru two social networks have found their way into the German Top 100 who have a clear Eastern European Userbase. Livejournal is only slightly popular in the US, but one of the biggest networks in Russia. Odnoklassniki is similar to Linkedin, but targeted at the Russian Market. The larger number of Russians and Eastern Europeans which migrated to Germany seem to have a heavy influence on Alexa-Traffic in Germany.