There's been a little spat over Google's new AppEngine (below). Basically, Google had an event called Campfire, where it showed a demo group chat application called HuddleChat. Some bloggers called this a rip-off of a 37Signals group chat program called Campfire: the two look pretty much the same. As John Gruber says at Daring Fireball:
Looking through the "gallery" of demo apps built with Google App Engine, the only one that seems more than half-baked is HuddleChat, written by Google employees Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, and Kyle Consalus. But HuddleChat is just a feature-for-feature clone of 37signals's Campfire. The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same. It even copies Campfire's trick of formatting a message as "code" if it contains literal newline characters.
Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it's creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-'90s way, when it's a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.
Google responded quickly by taking HuddleChat down. The Product Manager posted a comment (29) at Read Write Web, saying:
A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent web chat would do the trick. We've heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.
Thanks, Pete Koomen Product Manager, Google App Engine Team
Others pointed out that there was already a collaborative Huddle application from a startup based in London, England.
Google's defenders argue that there are only so many ways to do group chat, and that it's not a new idea anyway. People doing similar research in similar places are likely to come up with similar results, even if they work independently (which is why all hatchbacks tend to look much the same). It's also true that coincidences happen. The question is, how many coincidences add up to a rip-off?
Not that this helps Google much. Whether it ripped anybody off or not, it's huge wealth and monopoly market share of search mean it has to be careful what it does. As Huddle's Andy McLoughlin points out in a comment (41) to the Read Write Web story:
Huddle (http://www.huddle.net) has already existed for well over a year and has trademarks registered all over the place. Poor research on Google's part. Whatever happened to "don't be evil" (and walk all over the little guy's brand)?
Good point, but I don't think Andy will be crying himself to sleep tonight. Google's gaffes have given Campfire and Huddle a ton of free publicity that would be hard to match any other way.
