The Brothers Grimm notwithstanding, there's just something uniquely German about brothers in business. The simmering rivalry between the brothers behind Adidas and its splinter-off Puma or the founding brothers of Aldi who divided Germany between North and South are just two of the most well known cases.

Enter the Web 2.0 generation of brotherly biz: the Samwer brothers, Marc, Oliver and Alexander. The so-called Kopy Kat Kidz have made a killing funding companies that refit American web brands into viable Germanized equivalents. Most recently the Samwer brother helped float the Twitter clone Frazr and the €100m community site and cash cow StudiVZ, which happens to be a spitting image of Facebook, right down to the code.

courtesy of flickr user www.typografie.info

This week Facebook launched its German site, benefitting from the work of 2,000 Wiki-style German-speaking volunteers who helped determine details, for instance, that poke would be best understood as anklopfen.

In an interesting turn of events last month the would-be rival Samwer brothers announced they had acquired a share of Facebook Germany and would also be helping the company recruit staff and generate traffic. Considering the challenges that Facebook, er, faces in Deutschland—myspace has been germanized for two years already and some experts doubt that German users are quite as enchanted by the add-in apps that dazzle the Brits and the Americans—it would appear that with their own 4m-strong community site and a stake in potential rival/inspiration, the Samwer brothers are well-positioned for multiple winds of change, be it a Facebook bash or a backlash.