August 12th, 2011

Facebook Bans Netlog For Violating Its Policies

netlog

Exclusive – TechCrunch has learned that an alleged violation of Facebook’s policies has resulted in a relatively high-profile casualty: Netlog, a sizable European social network, got banned from the Facebook platform earlier this week.

Netlog isn’t widely known in the United States, but has been around for more than a decade and claims 80 million users, most of them in Europe and the Middle… → Read More

January 14th, 2011

Netlog creates, becomes part of Massive Media; expands to New York and Dubai

European social networking site Netlog is to become part of a newly established social media company dubbed Massive Media, the company announced yesterday.

The Ghent, Belgium-based company says its product portfolio will soon be expanded to new markets but declined to disclose any further information on future projects at this point.

Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert did reveal that the company… → Read More

January 14th, 2011

Netlog Creates, Becomes Part Of Massive Media; Expands To New York And Dubai

European social networking site Netlog is to become part of a newly established social media company dubbed Massive Media, the company announced yesterday.

The Ghent, Belgium-based company says its product portfolio will soon be expanded to new markets but declined to disclose any further information on future projects at this point.

Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert did reveal that the company… → Read More

August 21st, 2010

Netlog Taking Gaming Seriously, Prepares For US, Dubai Expansion (TCTV)

Netlog, the company that sagely changed its name from Facebox in 2007, is taking this gaming thing pretty seriously.

While the bread and butter of the Belgium-based operation is still social— with 69 million members on its youth-centric social network— gaming is now nearly 20% of revenues and climbing, according to Netlog founder, Lorenz Bogaert.

Twenty percent is fairly significant when you… → Read More

October 29th, 2009

Netlog launches Gatcha!, a cross-network social game distribution platform

I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.

In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also… → Read More

October 29th, 2009

Netlog gets a major makeover, now growing at 500,000 users a week

Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped… → Read More

October 29th, 2009

Netlog To Launch Global Social Game Distribution Platform Called Gatcha!

I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.

In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also… → Read More

October 29th, 2009

Netlog Gets A New Look, Signs Up Half A Million New Users Every Week

Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped… → Read More

July 18th, 2009

Belgian Tax Watchdogs Tracking Facebook, Netlog Updates

Not entirely unexpected, but still weird to see it confirmed and acknowledged: the federal tax administration in Belgium, my home country, is keeping tabs on citizens (article in Dutch) via their Facebook and Netlog profiles and their activities on eBay and other social networking sites.

Accountants are quick to point out the watchdogs can’t actually use any of the public status updates, photos… → Read More

June 4th, 2009

Modeling The True Value Of Social Networks: 2009 Edition

A year ago we modeled out the true value of various social networks based on the idea that users in high-value online advertising markets like Japan, the UK and the U.S. were worth more (financially speaking) than those in lower value online advertising markets. Facebook had recently become the largest worldwide social network in terms of users, but based on our model MySpace was still by far the… → Read More

May 21st, 2009

Google Friend Connect Finds A Friend In Netlog

Google Friend Connect is now integrated with one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks, Netlog. Netlog, which has more than 45 million users worldwide, just implemented Google’s alternative to Facebook Connect, which allows users to sign in using any ID supported by Google Friend Connect (including Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID) and share their activities with their existing contacts.

Google’s… → Read More

May 19th, 2009

European Social Network Netlog To Use Mollom's Spam Filtering Tool

Spam filtering tool Mollom, a competitor to Automattic’s Akismet, has struck a deal to filter messages and comments for Netlog, one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks. Mollom will be filtering more than 4 million messages in over 25 languages for Netlog, which has 40 million worldwide users.

Mollom says that it has set up dedicated servers within Netlog’s data center to enable… → Read More

March 16th, 2009

AOL Rolls Out Bebo In Several European Countries

AOL’s People Networks division has today announced the launch of social networking site Bebo, which it acquired almost exactly one year ago, in several key European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

Before, Bebo was only available in English and for some reason also Polish, but now it will use IP-based geo-targetting to cater services in users’ mother tongues. → Read More

March 5th, 2009

Joost Continues Fight For Relevancy, Teams Up With Social Network Netlog

Don’t count out Joost just yet. We recently wrote it still has a heartbeat despite the fact they made the wrong bet years ago by underestimating the power of the web for watching videos. They finally switched to Flash late last year, giving up on P2P, and introduced some social networking features around the video viewing experience to battle established players like Hulu, TV.com and YouTube.

Now… → Read More

December 31st, 2008

Top Social Media Sites of 2008 (Facebook Still Rising)

What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). … → Read More

December 4th, 2008

Social Network Netlog To Kick Off Integrated Multiplayer Games

European social network Netlog has announced a deal with game developers Jadestone (Sweden) and Bigpoint (Germany) to start integrating multiplayer games into the community website. Users will be able to play games directly on Netlog without having to create extra accounts, which is a direct results of the social network’s use of the Google OpenSocial API.

The integration is currently still under… → Read More

June 23rd, 2008

Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks

Is MySpace worth $3 billion, or $20 billion? It depends on how you value a user. It’s time to start comparing the big global social networks on something other than unique visitors and page views. I believe an effective way to value a particular user is based on the average Internet advertising spend per person in the country they live in. The higher the spend, the more value the social… → Read More

April 5th, 2008

Europe Is Searching For Its Silicon Valley

Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley four or five years ago—hungry startups building Web companies on the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch. Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with… → Read More