There are only so many ways a chat application can look without going overboard and being disrespectful to the DOM... both companies took the "less is more" approach and, surprise surprise, they look similar... go figure. If 37 Signals want to accuse and be offended then they better start "designing" with some substance... all their stuff is damn near default looking... I dont take 37 Signals side on this one... not even close. They're just happy that people are noticing their product again (too bad it's being thrust along side something that took a few days (collectively) by 3 people to throw together as an example of google tech... lol... talk about being served up on a silver plate. 37 signals = pwned.)

Both of them look like I'd expect a simple browser based IM client to look.

What is 37Signals whining about?

If 37signals are actually complaining about this, that's just their clever way to get more PR by attaching on to a Google announcement. So, kudos to them for trying, but shame on blogs and media that started this non-story in the first place. What next? Complaining about blogs that have a sidebar on the right, a logo at the top left, and some Adsense on the page? They're called design patterns and they're not unique.

And anyway, 37Signals have presumably made a fair amount of money from Campfire already, so the fact that google comes in and does the same for free is hardly a tragedy that will leave them penniless.

All products have a limited life. Simple products have an even shorter life.

Daniel

Wow. Things are going to get interesting.

mIRC called, it wants you to stop copying it.

37 = whiny children.
Google = popular target.
Blogosphere = ass over foot about this silly thing.

I think one simple fact remains (and makes 37 signals look really bad): 37 Signals designed an enterprise product, developed it in who knows how long and charge way too much for it... Google had a few developers whip up something in their free time that they give away for free as a simple example of what their emerging technology is capable of supporting. That devalues the hell out of 37 signals... i'm sure the fact that Google's event was called "CAMPFIRE one" might lend to 37 Signals nervousness as well. lol. oh well...)

I feel like the first comment pretty much nailed it. This is something that many companies in the Web 2.0 world are going to run up against. When building out products with very low barriers to entry, unless there is a big network effect that locks people in to the system, companies will have to get creative with their sales, marketing, and product strategy. If the value of their product is so low that a couple of guys at Google can just slap it together on top of the free AppEngine, it's time for them to start taking advantage of the harder to duplicate asset they have - their customer base - and start innovating in ways that only they know based on real-world usage of the product and feedback. And they can use savvy marketing tricks like associating themselves with the currently most talked about technology story!

http://collegemogul.com

How else would you design a chat web app? Even 37signals campfire design is *not* new.

Perhaps if campfire had spent more time implementing useful features, they wouldn't be so simple to copy.

What next, are they going to rip off that HelloWorld that Java has !!!

*Angry*

WhoCares

I'd also like to point out that others noticed the similarities long before 37signals did, and I assume the comments were in response to bloggers asking them what they thought. I don't blame them for an honest response, but it's not like they ran out and lawyered up, which Google would surely have done if the situation was reversed.

"Here is my reaction to AppEngine: I asked our engineers to brush up on their Python. Fortunately, we have experience in it - a lot of our test automation scripts are Python based. I think AppEngine is going to be monstrously successful. And we at Zoho are going to embrace it whereever we can, just as we are already playing with Amazon AWS.

Fundamentally, we are a software company. We don’t compete against Google because of our infrastructure advantage over them, that’s for sure. Initiatives like Amazon AWS and Google AppEngine let us be a software company again - and that is a good thing! So here we come, Python … and to Ning, here is someone who remembered your original innovation. Thank you!"

It's inevitable neo

sorry for that

Thanks,
Pete Koomen
Product Manager, Google App Engine Team

Please dial 1-800-waa-waaa

It's called competition.

I'm sure now all the hipster web 2.0 guys are thinking "Forget copyleft, I wish I had patented something"

http://tinyurl.com/65my4q

Those metro's over at 37signals just got themselves some nice free publicity didn't they?

What happened to the "Less is More" bullshit today?

Why are they continuously adding more features to existing products?

Why can't they just keep building new products as they did after releasing Basecamp with just 2.5 developers ?

The simple reason is COMPETITION. If GMail never came, Yahoo will enjoy having a limitation of 6MB / mail account & charge for extra storage in Mail. They wouldn't have changed their mail interface. They did only after Google released GMail.

37Signals hate competition as it forces them to work harder & think harder.

Enjoy

Jere

MA from Techcrunch ripped off RWW's screenshot of HuddleChat and includes in his post about Huddlechat without attributing the image's source.

We're about to launch our own group chat application at

www.deskcafe.com, which is also built on Ruby. Take a look !

Jere

His key points was that the risk of sharing is more than offset by the marketing and brand advantages you get by "giving it away." Sounds to me that he want all of the upside of giving it away without any of the downside. Lame.

This is backfiring on you beautifully.

Also: John Gruber, you are scum.

There's nothing lame about it. We're selective about what we give away. You are too. It's our call with our stuff, your call with your stuff. You don't get to decide what you can take from us and we don't get to decide what we can take from you.

We choose what we want to give away. Like when we open sourced Rails. Or like when we put our book free online. Or when we publish stats on our blog that gives people insight into what it costs to run a web app. Or when we make Ta-da List or Writeboard entirely free. Or when Sam, who works for us, open sources the Prototype Javascript library he wrote.

But that doesn't mean anyone can take whatever they want because we give something else away. If that was the case, anything anyone does for charity would open up all their assets to anyone who wants anything. Anyone who helps someone once would have to help them forever. Any chef who shares one recipe would have to share all their recipes.

That would be an unreasonable burden for anyone to shoulder.

Quit your whining!

Jason is typically their mouthpiece so perhaps it is his personal style thet rubs me the wrong way, but he nonetheless represents the entire company.

You'd think we C&D'd Google, filed a multi-million dollar infringement lawsuit, published a scathing opinion piece on our blog, picketed their offices, held a damning press conference, launched a boycott, made a sobbing plea on TV for Google to pick on someone their own size, threatened them with flaming torches and hot pokers, and bullied them into submission! We did none of the above and nothing of the sort.

If anyone is curious, there has been no official communication between anyone at Google and anyone at 37signals. Nothing legal, nothing causal. Not an email, not a letter, not a phone call. Nothing. No group chats either.

We simply issued an official single 40-odd word statement to a reporter. We said we were disappointed that Google was behind a product that we -- and many people around the web -- felt was a functional and visual rip of Campfire. We thought it was beneath Google -- a sentiment shared by many others around the web who said they felt this behavior was below the high standards that Google set for itself. Whether or not you agree is of course up to you, but to suggest we're crying or whining or having a hissy fit or afraid of competition or claim to have invented group chat? That's out of left field in your own ballpark. Disappointment is not crying any more than being happy is having an orgasm.

Google didn't react to the few words I said, they reacted to the thousands of words other people said.

The posts and articles around the web suggesting that HuddleChat was a rip of Campfire weren't written by us. They were written by independent individuals -- developers, designers, business owners, journalists, observers -- who felt that Google went too far. These are other people's opinions. If you have a problem with their perspective, take it up with them. While I may agree with some of these folks, I can't speak for other people.

The truth, as it usually does, falls somewhere in between the distant edges of opinion. But apparently a critical mass of free people generated enough heat that Google took HuddleChat down. That was Google's choice and Google's choice alone. Their hand was not forced by us in any way. We've taken no action. Public opinion was the driver, not anything we said or did.

We thank those people who sympathized with us for their support. And we thank those people who didn't agree with us for speaking their mind. We learned a lot. Finally, we thank Google for listening and taking the action they thought was most appropriate.

"We choose what we want to give away. Like when we open sourced Rails. ...But that doesn't mean anyone can take whatever they want because we give something else away. If that was the case,...(a)ny chef who shares one recipe would have to share all their recipes."

Nobody's looking at your source code. Nobody is stealing proprietary trade secrets. Nobody is using your proprietary technology. Yes, they've clearly copied elements of your design. Big friggin' deal. Just because that's how you differentiate your company doesn't mean that anyone else should care. It's DESIGN. This is common practice and it's good for the market. Take a look at Salesforce.com and then look at SugarCRM (the UIs are very similar). Or take a look at any ERP app. Or, for that matter, look at virtually any single-user chat app. I'd bet a dollar that when you were designing your products, you looked at other products on the market, found features (and design elements) that you liked and incorporated them into the product. The industry moves forward based on the work of those who came before. If you don't want competitors leveraging the work that you've done, change to an old-school enterprise software business model so that noone can see/use your product until they've been vetted by a sales rep.

Regarding your second comment -- the fact that you didn't protest first or most loudly doesn't mean that you didn't have a hand in their taking it down. When you send an e-mail expressing your "disappointment" to RWW, it's going to have an impact.

Your second comment seems to be becoming a pattern for you. When you guys had your big outage a few months back, you jumped all over Rackspace for their poor support. When your users pointed out that the outage was caused by your failure to implement a hot standby, you then said that you weren't saying that it was Rackspace's fault and you "took full responsibility." In this case, the community jumps on you again for whining, and you fall back to "it was the blogosphere that brought this up...I wasn't the first person who complain and I didn't even do it that loudly." The pattern: whine, blame, then claim that "it wasn't really what I was saying/doing."

I repeat...lame.

"You'd think we C&D'd Google, filed a multi-million dollar infringement lawsuit, published a scathing opinion piece on our blog, picketed their offices, held a damning press conference, launched a boycott, made a sobbing plea on TV for Google to pick on someone their own size, threatened them with flaming torches and hot pokers, and bullied them into submission!"

I'd have to really disagree with this. None of the comments seem to me to be on this level. It's exactly what I'd expect a persons reaction would be to what actually happened, which basically is you accused Google of ripping off your product, a product in a field with a set design and a level of expected functionality of which neither was set by 37Signals. There's no other way to make a chat room, that's in a minimalist design like Google makes stuff (just look at their homepage, it's got nothing but useful search things), usable, and has enough features to actually be used by anyone other than the design you both pretty much use. Its the sort of design I'd expect a caveman would come up with if he was taught programming and given the same design specs, even though he's never seen any chat programs at all.

See: "We simply issued an official single 40-odd word statement to a reporter. We said we were disappointed that Google was behind a product that we -- and many people around the web -- felt was a functional and visual rip of Campfire."

As it stands, there really is only so many ways to make a web based chat service, and most of those ways fail basic human use guidelines. The numbers fall even lower when it's a minimalist design, something Google is known for more than 37Signals. Given the context of the situation and what you've said, it gives the general appearance that you claim credit for the first and only allowed chat room too, in spite of many other chat programs predating your work that your app looks a lot like. Despite your similarity to them though, they have never said anything about being disappointed in you for what appeared to be a functional and visual rip of their own chat program. Like it or not, the underlying fact is that you are just as guilty as Google is in this area (which I'd actually say is not very guilty at all, how many different styles of usable chat rooms are there really?), yet you feel nothing but pride from your accomplishments and are disappointed in Google for having something you feel is a functional and visual rip of your own product. On the other hand, in other areas of guilt Google is only guilty of bringing more competition to the area of chat rooms, whereas you are guilty of using carefully crafted words to incite anger at an innocent company all in an attempt to keep them from competing in one of your areas and generate press time for your company. One of these things is encouraged by the government to prevent monopolies from being able to wreck everyones lives, the other might actually by a criminal offense if proven in court (not sure off-hand need to pick up my law book again and reread the section on monopolies, business tactics, and what the laws governing them are).

The entirety of what Google's response and what everyone else has posted on their blogs isn't at issue here, all the comments accusing you stand on your own little 40 word statement given out to a reporter and none of them were overreacting. This was all just a PR stunt you saw the opportunity for when Google rolled out their own product, and now it's starting to backfire so you're trying to save face by making strawman arguments about anyone against you overreacting and saying that you didn't really say anything that bad to Google. I doubt Google would've received the complaints it did about going too far without your crafted message going out into the news saying they went to far in your opinion, and I think that huddlechat would still be up and running.

You might also want to learn a little about public relations before you post anything else too, since that second paragraph is going to have most of the people who disagreed a little with you already (and some of the fence sitters) and it's going to put them off enough to be seriously against you. I personally was on the fence, not caring at all until I saw your statement after reading all the other comments here before it. Then again, do whatever you want as at this point I really don't care if you keep doing stuff that makes more and more people turn against you.

I just blogged about this debate on my blog and would like to know what you think...

http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/huddlechat-_-huddlechat/

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-04-09.html

Jason, why don't you read slashdot to see how much of whining losers they think you and your fan boys are?

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/09/1256222.shtml

Stop claiming that the bare minimum of a chat client is YOURS.

I'm not convinced you can call 37S Campfire product "designed"... what's next... accusing someone of ripping off Dave Winers website design??

You, sir, are a complete idiot. If you truly think that Campfire, or any other manmade thing on Earth, has no design, I have some Las Vegas oceanfront property I'd like to sell you.

Oh get off it, 37signals. Do you honestly think you invented (and own) the concept of group chat?

What is with all of these stupid comments? This has nothing to do with the concept of group chat and everything to do with an unauthorized point-by-point clone of a piece of software.

I think one simple fact remains (and makes 37 signals look really bad): 37 Signals designed an enterprise product, developed it in who knows how long and charge way too much for it...

What does how much they charge for Campfire have anything to do with this? This is more proof that a lot of these comments are borne of personal feelings toward 37signals, their software and their philosophies rather than logic.

----

Here are the points I'd like to make:
1) Put yourself in 37signals' shoes for a minute.
2) This is laziness on Google's part. They could have changed the game -- instead, they cloned the game.
3) 37signals has shown remarkable restraint. They merely said they don't like it.

Imitation is the greatest form of monetary gain...

O, it waz jus ta pet shawp appwicashun fwom 1999.

I on the other hand believe in IP, believe that a free market economy is the best step forward, I support competition and a lack or regulation of govt restriction on inventions.

But as much as I believe in IP, I cannot admit, and I won't because this is a case of doing something incredibly trivially, that Campfire had any NEW IP involved with it other than the prettyness. But that prettyness is a style, it comes from a web2.0 community, they love rounded corners and drop shadows. It is the style.

people like DAN above, 37signals, and Jason Fried just need to grow up, they need to realize their product exist within a market place and by doing the bare minimum to have a chat client they simply were cloning other people's work. Fanboys, 37signals, Jason Fired, grow up. Your IP was the code and the CSS, the idea is old and plenty of other people have done way before with or without AJAX.

You guys are like AirCanada, trying to sell customer service that used to be free. Your product will be free to the consumer from your competitors, get over it, innovate, adapt and change.

Oh boy, here we go...

They can't stand the idea of competition, even worse, they have incredibly murky ideas of IP, they will steal movies, games and music but when it comes to little stomping ground, web apps, they get up in arms.

Talk about a straw man argument. How do you expect to have your viewpoint considered reasonable when you can't even stay on topic in your first paragraph?

But if you really want to go down that road, I don't think Google has done anything illegal here. But I do think they've done something lazy and a little underhanded. Why is that so hard to understand?

But as much as I believe in IP, I cannot admit, and I won't because this is a case of doing something incredibly trivially, that Campfire had any NEW IP involved with it other than the prettyness. But that prettyness is a style, it comes from a web2.0 community, they love rounded corners and drop shadows. It is the style.

Again with this notion that design can only mean what it looks like! The more important aspect is that HuddleChat works exactly the same way as Campfire. Down to the letter.

Your product will be free to the consumer from your competitors, get over it, innovate, adapt and change.

Un-freakin-believable... Google clones another company's software and yet you have the gall to tell 37signals to "innovate, adapt and change"? Why spare Google this indignant little piece of advice?

Again, people just don't like 37signals for whatever reason -- if the roles were reversed, people would rightly be calling 37signals a bunch of dorks for ripping off Google. But because some folks perceive Jason Fried and company to be "arrogant," this is all justified.

You people are hilarious. 37signals did nothing beyond give a statement saying they didn't like it. Thousands of reasonable people made their voices known that HuddleChat looked like an insincere effort on the part of Google, unbeknownst to 37signals.

When they launched OpenSocial and the Social Graph API and we kept trying to contact them saying "Hey, That looks a lot like what we've been doing with FindMeOn.com and OpenSN.org [OpenSN (Open Social Network)] since 2006," they failed to return any calls or emails.

It's refreshing to know that they suddenly now apologize for cloning/reimplementing/"accidentally developing" the same exact products as other firms.

all agreed my question for a long time is then why there is lots of fuss, hue and cry about googles inventions
1) about google mail, was the UI different to yahoo mail, was it great from yahoo's offering
2) google maps - did they invented mapping technologies

i do apprecite that google has done revolution in search, but I feel any stealing of ideas should be illigal (against their own policy of not being evil)
did they by accident named that event as "campfire"
just imagine what would have happened if microsoft did the same against google apps...what google had to say on this

very closely related but not quite the same thing.

*ducking*

:)