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• Richard, I think both have a place. Original ideas are the clear winners, but the clones normally come with something "extra". If this extra feature is any good, it gets copied by the original creators fast. Today digg is much better than only a few months ago. Same for others.

  Innovation is important, but it is not the only thing that you need to be the best. If not, look at Microsoft. Or at Dell, Or .... :)

  For me the important question is where and why innovation happens. I see more and more happening in San Francisco. In a global economy, it should happen everywhere, not focussed in one place. But for some reason, most of it seems to happen there. Is it technology, brains, or simply finance ??

  I said finance because this is true only for web innovation, nothing else. In other fields, the global economy makes innovation to be more diverse, not less. Is it that the rest of the world is too scared of investing in web projects ??

  Nice reading you :D

  Posted by: hombrelobo | September 8, 2006 5:46 AM





• Richard,

  I think cloning is not only uncool, but is also unlawful. The fact of the matter is that our IP law (at least in US) is simply unable to keep up with the accelerating pace of technology evolution. If it did, it would have mechasims in place for prohibit and punish cloning.

  Alex

  Posted by: Alex Iskold | September 8, 2006 6:46 AM





• Is YouTube Waiting For The Payoff? Read more: http://techaddress.wordpress.com/2006/09/08/youtube-waiting-for-the-payoff-businessweek/

  Posted by: TechAddress | September 8, 2006 7:30 AM





• interesting article. There are still alot of things that need to be fixed. There is so much room for innovation on so many levels.

  When we set out to create something new we really looked at exisiting problems that needed improvement.

  Regarding the international copying ...companies should be offering more languages. We intend to be out in 8 languages soon after launch. Many big companies have figured this out, small web2 companies should be looking at it. (8 languages = 8 language files)

  by not having my product in italian, finnish, spanish, french, chinese, japenese i am leaving a void. I am opening the door to someone filling the need in thier native language.

  Cheers,

  Scott

  Posted by: scott | September 8, 2006 10:34 AM





• Cloning should be prevented at all costs! Because it is illegal and throws away the charm of natural things.

  Posted by: Alcohol | September 8, 2006 12:48 PM





• re: "I think both have a place. Original ideas are the clear winners, but the clones normally come with something "extra". If this extra feature is any good, it gets copied by the original creators fast"
  I agree, clones are often better than the original and sometimes blow the originals out of the water (who would have thought MySpace would kill Friendster?). At the same time, maybe this means that originals need to move faster by maintaining close communication with their users and adjusting accordingly. We are already seeing this happen...would you ever see a mortar and bricks company make huge operational changes within weeks of receiving customer feedback? Essentially, users are starting to have a more and more active role in the businesses that they are involved with every day, and I see this as a good thing. Cloning means competition, and competition ultimately means a better product. Crappy clones will die out anyway, so who cares?

  Re: "companies should be offering more languages" I could not agree more!!!! For a couple thousand dollars a translator can translate a whole site into another language, so why not do it from the beginning? Not doing so opens up a gaping whole for locals in different countries to clone your site, when you could be gaining global users and brand recognition. I'm really surprised YouTube hasn't translated into all major languages for example. As we speak, clones are popping up around the world. Big Mistake!

  Posted by: adria | September 8, 2006 2:32 PM





• the cloning site is called bababian,located in China's Shandong province.

  i've chatted with bababian's employees and they thought copying flickr was just their competitive strength.

  can you believe?

  Posted by: Yee | September 9, 2006 12:11 AM





• manully trackback:
  http://web20viewer.blogspot.com/2006/09/bababian-sideslip-of-flickr.html

  Posted by: Yee | September 9, 2006 12:38 AM





• I see more and more happening in San Francisco. In a global economy, it should happen everywhere, not focussed in one place. But for some reason, most of it seems to happen there. Is it technology, brains, or simply finance ??

  None of the above. (In the SF Bay area, finance is centered in Menlo Park, Technology around Santa Clara, and the brains are probably in Berkeley and Palo Alto... but the innovations? They're coming out of San Francisco proper. These towns are all less that 50 miles apart, but they're vastly different culturally -- and that's much more important than distance in the world of the locationless Internet. Besides -- Finance is centered in New York, Technology in Cambridge, and the center of raw brain power is probably somewhere else in New England.)

  The magic of San Francisco isn't the raw materials (brains,tech,money), it's what can be made with these materials when you've got SF's attitude and its history of counterculture. That's not something that you're likely to clone (on a large scale, anyway) anywhere else.

  Back in the gold rush days, it took balls to uproot yourself and move west in search of gold. After surviving the Rockies and actually getting to the West coast, it took balls, and a willingness to go against conventional wisdom for someone to say, "Now that I'm here, I'm not going to search for gold. I'm going to make durable clothing and sell it to the rich gold speculators."

  Yes, I'm talking about Levi Strauss, one of the most famous San Franciscans. Back in the days when there was no reason to go west except to strike gold, Mr. Strauss came West to sell clothing and tents (something he could've done in New York, without spending harsh months on the trail). New York investors would've thought he was nuts (why take such a risk to do something you can do risk-free here). Gold miners didn't understand (why aren't you trying to get rich quick?, didn't you hear there's gold in them hills?). But this didn't matter to Strauss. I'm wearing his legacy right now. Are you?

  Fast-forward 100 years or so to the 1950s, when the gay subculture really started to take hold in SF (see also: The Black Cat bar). People who were shunned by their families, their communities, and society at large found a home in San Francisco. Folks who'd been told all their lives that what they were doing -- and who they were -- was WRONG, suddenly had a home where they were accepted for who they were. The culture of SF had enough latitude to allow those who didn't belong elsewhere to come to SF and thrive. (See also: the beats)

  Go forward to the mid 1960s. Young men were supposed to wear their hair short, and either signed up for the draft (as is your American duty) or went to school to earn their deferment (or had Daddy pull some strings with the Texas National Guard, but that's another story). But there was an entire class of people who didn't believe that it was their duty to sign up for a war they didn't believe in -- in short, that what American society said was the right path for young people was, "Like, bullshit, man..."

  San Francisco welcomed them, while the rest of America called them names and said that they'd never amount to anything. Many of these folks now own multi-million dollar homes in the Marin headlands, and still live their lives believing that people should be free, no matter the length of their hair, color of their skin, and so on and so forth. And history has told us that the war was wrong, and that free love didn't cause America to become one giant commune, and that black people really aren't that much different from white people, and... and...

  In the early 1990s, a magazine was launched, not in New York, but in SOMA. It broke virtually all the rules of design, using very bright colors in unreadable combinations, text overlayed on top of other text... It was printed on a six-color press and sent in an envelope by first class mail (which made it a very expensive subscription). The traditional magazine moguls derided it -- but people, especially people on the cutting edge of technology, bought it.

  I'm talking, of course, about Wired (which hasn't been the same since Conde Nast purchased it in 1996). Was Wired the kind of magazine that would have been launched from an office above Madison Ave? No... it came from a warehouse on 3rd Street.

  And then there was the dot-com era. SF was full of people, young and inexperienced, with radical ideas of what could be done with a global communications network. They didn't have MBAs. Most of them didn't have BAs, or much business experience. But they had ideas -- some good, some bad, and scant few with obvious revenue potential. Anywhere else, these folks would be discouraged, laughed out of meetings, and told to grow up. Because nobody in normal society is going to let a punk kid with an unproven idea get anywhere -- business is best left to the professionals, who've been following the rules of business for three generations.

  San Francisco welcomed these punk kids -- just as it had welcomed people with ideas that seemed "wrong" throughout The City's short history. Some of their businesses went down in flames. Others took off like rockets. Sure... most of them failed unspectacularly (uh, fizzled?) -- but that's been true of all new businesses throughout time. And the ones that succeeded changed the world.

  What I'm getting at is this: San Francisco has a long, ingrained history of welcoming outsiders with dangerous ideas. People who don't think the way that everyone else believes they "should" think. And these people are exactly the kind of people that create innovation. Innovators don't play by everyone else's rules, at work, at play, in life. Give them a place where they're allowed, nay encouraged, to live their lives the way they choose to, to challenge the conventional business wisdom, and you'll have the right atmosphere for large leaps in business progress.

  Without it, you've got Fairfax, Virginia. When the going gets tough there, everyone puts their ties back on and goes back to working for the same defense contractors that have been planted there for decades.

  But when you've got a city where it seems normal for your plumber to be gay, your accountant to smoke more marijuana than your college roomate did, your lawyer to wear jeans, and millionaires to drive VW Busses and wear tie-dye every day, then you've got a city that will welcome innovation and "out of the box" thinking. San Francisco has got more than 100 years of history welcoming these outsiders... anywhere else that wants to foster the kind of magic that takes place in those 49 square miles has got some serious catching up to do.

  Posted by: Toxic | September 9, 2006 5:58 PM





• For a couple thousand dollars a translator can translate a whole site into another language, so why not do it from the beginning?

  Because international support isn't just translating your site. It's having multi-lingual customer support. It's having a solid cultural understanding of the audience you're serving... it's having programmers that will notice that their code is accidentally changing the meaning the text on the preferences page. There's a lot more to it than just translation.

  Personally, I think it's better for a new product to pick a single, definable market, and go after it full-force. Establish success, and then perhaps expand your market.

  Otherwise, you're trying to serve too many disparate people at once, and you'll end up not serving any of them as well as you could.

  Again, conventional business wisdom says "Target the largest market you can, because 10% of 20 million is a lot better than 50% of 100,000". That may be true in the long-term, but isn't always true when you're starting out.

  Posted by: Toxic | September 9, 2006 6:03 PM





• "i've chatted with bababian's employees and they thought copying flickr was just their competitive strength."

  While I am already quite familiar with the Chinese Web 2.0 market, I am surprised to see what Yee wrote... Indeed there are many copycat services in China, they do normally adjust to the local flavor with added features. It's purely stupid to admit that "copying" is their competitive strength. Even if you borrow some ideas from others, a startup company should always focus on developing its unique competitive strength.

  Posted by: Richard | September 9, 2006 8:12 PM





• At http://eyeOS.org, we've asked the users to translate and support in diffferent languages, using our wiki. We have so far mor than 30 languages covered: http://eyeos.org/wiki/index.php/Language_Translations

  Of course, being a GPL project helps to have the users interested in working hard, because they know that what they do is for their own benefit, not only for the project owners'.

  Posted by: hombrelobo | September 10, 2006 3:41 AM





• let's fix the bug of the language all around the world, and the originality will be back, it is totally normal to create a copy of flicker in China, because there are more potential user speaking chinese (more than a billion) than people speaking english.... the world wide web is about the world not about California or 3 countries... Cyworld is not only korean, it is also in Japan, in China...the amount of users is superior to mypage and I won't be too wrong by saying that they do more benefits...it is just that most of the people believe that the web speaks english, but if I remember some stats of 2 years ago, there are less pages on the web in english than in chinese and some other languages....
  So if I was an entrepreneur and wanted to make money with a web application I won't target only the english speaking countries...

  About GPL, let's face it, it is a pretty idea, but people usually, they wants to make money with their own products, the translation done by some nice guys will never be equal to a real translation job, and a bad translation only allow "educated" people to get the technology...

  If I wanted to do a lot of money with a flicker "like" software, I would target the country that sell the most digital cameras, phone with cameras and the place where people take the most pictures... and that won't be europe or America, but Asia...
  We need to educate ourself, cause even if we pretend to have a very open mind, the internet is still not "world wide" style... and it is pôssible Yahoo; google, amazon, they all exist everywhere...

  Posted by: Thierry_BEZIER | September 10, 2006 1:57 PM





• # 9

  Yes, that is all good. But many other places do the same. Look at Barcelona, at Amsterdam, at Oslo. They are all very liberal, great economies, very successful in other fields, but not quite catching in web companies.

  If you want to talk about open minded and liberal, for instance, in Barcelona the gay marriage is legal, and even walking naked in the street is legal (I swear, I took a video). You cannot be arrested if you walk completely naked in the middle of the road. Try to do that in San Francisco !! :)

  I still think it has more to do with finance and networking than anything else. Sucessfull internet companies tend to invest in more internet companies, and so on.

  Oh, and the influence of a few Universities, I guess.

  But I am jelous ....

  Posted by: hombrelobo | September 11, 2006 2:32 AM





• Look at Barcelona, at Amsterdam, at Oslo.

  I'm familiar with the first two, but I haven't spent any time in Norway... but these aren't quite what I'm talking about when I say counterculture. No doubt that Amsterdam is one of the most permissive places on the planet, but you don't see a whole lot of locals in the red light districts or in the coffee shops (though perhaps, as a tourist, I was just in the wrong places). Permitting something, embracing it, and encouraging it are different things.

  walking naked in the street is legal

  That's sort of my point, too. Innovators break the rules. Walking down the street naked in SF is illegal, but people do it all the time. The annual footrace, parades, and so on bring residents and visitors alike out in droves, and in all sorts of states of dress.

  The attitude that I was talking about in SF wasn't just one of "live how you wanna live", as much as "don't let us tell you how to live, and when we do, feel free to ignore us". The difference is subtle, but vast at the same time.

  The nonconformity has been known to extend beyond software, too.

  Posted by: Toxic | September 19, 2006 3:41 AM