So it would seem that the outrage of the author is misplaced. The emphasis is put on the fact that the sites are being cloned, but that is not where the value lies. The value is in gaining traction in international markets. This practice seems perfectly legitimate to me. The straw man in this article is developed from the belief that the raw value of a startup comes only from the software.
They don't only clone, they also spam Pinterest with fake accounts. Those accounts post lots of comments linking back to Pinspire. So it's definitely not clean competition.
I wouldn't say it's completely misplaced. Any good product is a combination of parts, one part idea, one part execution, one part customer acquisition etc
We love to see totally original ideas succeed, we feel like they deserve it. Actually, cloned ideas can also be hard work only without the complication of having the idea in the first place!
Even so, it is kind of desperate when you have to keep copying other people, no one likes to see that. Although I'm sure it's not something they worry about while they back their yacht into the Monaco marina!
It seems to me like they are efficiently capitalizing on the ethnocentricity of the US. In a way I'm even happy they are reminding US startups of that.
While living in the states as a youngster I actually searched for that word quite a bit to describe what I was seeing around me: the sense that everything besides the US hardly existed at all.
I don't see why this was downvoted - of interest to the discussion and has relevant links
And it's pretty interesting that we notice the 'Western' clones of businesses but not necessarily the Asian clones (which have a potential impact/reach orders of magnitude higher)
A lot of hackers won't develop a product unless it is a brand new concept that has never been marketed before. These guys actually do their research and compete with companies that are trying to do a land grab. I can see the draw of innovating and creating something new but I can also see the draw of finding a business model and making money. It's not wrong in the least.
It would be ironic if the clone was less buggy than the original in this case.
My experience with Pinterest was so frustrating. At times it seemed there were more bugs than working features. Beta? Sure, you don't have to check if, e.g. the notification board - the main "social" feature of your web site - works at all if you are in beta. And sure, you don't have to respond to suggestions and bug reports from your users.
On top of the myriad of glitches I discovered while using it, I eventually deleted my account at Pinterest, only to discover a few months later, that my boards still exist, people repin stuff and I receive notifications by email, even though my profile and the possibility to switch notifications off don't exist anymore.
Never seen a web service so beautifully designed and so terribly buggy at the same time.
Dear startups, can you please hire competent developers who feel responsible for what they roll out to the production servers?
The biggest issues I ran into (when creating a pinboard of graphic Tee designs I like) were likely due to poorly-handled replication. I'd create a pin, and it would redirect me to a page that would immediately 404. If I refreshed, it would sometimes render the thing I posted, and sometimes 404. Furthermore, any changes I made to pins would come and go, and I'd have to resubmit the form several times before it would persist. This wasn't fixed over the course of the several weeks during which I added pins.
It's a real tribute to the wonderfully crisp design that I actually stuck around to deal with all of that crap. Honestly, if it weren't for the design, I would have rolled my own shitty clone using some Rails bootstraps and the paperclip gem. (I just wanted to show my friends some graphic tee designs!)
Obviously a startup doesn't want to be copied this way, but if the company making the clones is actually good at getting users internationally, could this end up being a net win for the original company? The clone gets popular in other countries, then gets bought by the original who gets immediate presence in other markets in return. Seems like in at least some circumstances it could work out. Maybe?
That doesn't make it a net win. The fact that, given that the clone exists, they prefer buying it to not buying it doesn't mean they prefer the clone existing to it not existing.
Would you argue that a company should ever consider the fact that other companies might prefer them not to exist when they're thinking about what market to target and how to target it, though?
I'm fine with being negative on the approach of literally stealing the details of all that the incumbent does, but as a rule, I don't think that it's really a problem if an acquirer wishes the acquiree didn't exist at all, isn't that the reason for a large number of acquisitions?
But in a viable market, there will be competition.
Anyway, I'm talking about the transaction itself, which they consider a net win, otherwise they wouldn't participate.
The only time a party participates in a transaction that they don't consider a net win is when they're forced to participate (i.e. they're being robbed or paying taxes).
And Google copied the search engine from many others before it.
Ebay wasn't the first Auction site. Amazon wasn't the first site to sell books. etc. etc.
So Andrew Dumont, let me get something straight.
It's not alright for sites to copy ideas but it is perfectly alright for you to copy images/tables from the economist, put them on your site/blog and pass them off as your own?
Google didn't copy the search engine. They reinvented it. Amazon didn't copy the businesses and websites of other booksellers. They came up with a whole new approach.
Get real Tnuc. There is a big, big different from using a small image from another site, and coping a whole site, it's layout, colour scheme, functionality, and even using a similar domain/brand name.
There's a difference between copying piece by piece and re-invention, as wpietri points out.
You're right, I should have linked directly to the Economist from the image -- updated. There's a source denoted in the bottom left corner of the image, thought that would suffice.
I'm not in the traffic business, I'm just interested in the trends of the industry.
I would never want the IDEA of pinterest to be protected, but pinspire's name, branding and service are so strikingly similar that it will undoubtedly cause confusion among potential customers. That should be illegal, and I imagine that it already is to some degree; I know for a fact that if I started coka cola soda company tomorrow I would probably have a cease and desist letter on my doorstep the very next day. I don't know the law but there has to be some recourse in cases as extreme as this...
Allowing companies to exactly clone other companies is not necessarily good for the market, and I tend to think it's a net negative, especially if it has a chilling effect on innovation.
For an example - at one point in the past, I thought about making a Facebook game, but then I thought "If it succeeds, Zynga will just clone it immediately and pour millions of dollars into marketing theirs, making mine seem like the knockoff". So, I said screw that and I started something else that wasn't a Facebook game. In this case, this sort of effect helps Zynga develop a monopoly.
In making something, making the right set of design decisions is vastly harder than implementing it once those decisions are made. Back when implementation was also extremely difficult, this was probably less of a problem, but now that you can outsource your infrastructure, this is potentially a very real problem.
It must be horrible to see someone else ripping off your work like that. I mean Pinspire is almost identical to Pinterest. The question is what do you do? do you ignore them and try to focus on your product without letting anger affect your creativity and the initial flow of ideas or do you try to compete with them?
I think you've put your finger on it: the biggest danger of people copying you is not the competition, but that anger at them will distract you.
As competitors they're not as dangerous as they seem. Copying someone can tell you what to do, but it can't tell you why you're doing it, and you're probably not going to do something well if you don't know why you're doing it.
pg is right to say you shouldn't let clones be a big distraction. This is especially true for Pinterest because we're a small team and we have a lot of work to do. We're trying to build something important that makes life better for lots of people. If you want to help us, you should write to me.
Lots of people on this thread say that clones are inevitable and profitable. That might be true, but at least for me, it would be a sad way to spend my time. I'd hate to tell my kids that I used my best years copying other peoples' products instead of trying to create new ones.
Implement independent user accounts. I got an invite to join Pinterest and then found that I can only sign up using Twitter (no thank you) or Facebook (ultra-double no thank you).
Pinspire will let me create a Pinspire account, so right off the bat they are more useful to me. If they offer an Android app I'll be completely sold.
Note to Web apps who think they are fodder for such cloning: You best be really full-featured out of the gate, otherwise you've given away your lead in the arms race.
It sucks but unfortunately if your business is successful and it can be cloned it will be cloned: there is 5B people in the world and some these 5B will do it. There will be clones in Russia, in China, in Bulgaria, in Germany, everywhere: depending on how hard it is to replicate/clone.
Unfortunately, it is relatively easy to clone the software part of http://pinterest.com/ so that will be cloned.
I do not know about other sites on the list, but cember.net was not a clone. It was the sole player of business network in the time in Turkey. It gained real traction here and It's owners were out of ideas or out of interest of making money by running it. Then they have sold it for good money to Xing. If they haven't I believe they would burn out. And then cember.net "merged into" Xing and business networking in Turkey demolished.
Dont forget the history of that. In Germany, many US-Startups don't work. US-Startups often are damn US-centric. Many won't even allow registration from other countries (google music, netflix). Others have or had no german interface (Facebook got one 2008, before that was a big hurdle for a social network targeting not only young and educated people). I remember predictify, it had a large section of predictions of US-politics, but no area for politics of other countries (and so no such questions). Heck, Youtube is almost unusable here because it gets censored and Google don't seem to care (imagine that in the US-market).
In all those cases and in many more, you will find imitations of these sites as the service isn't accessible here (at least not as good as possible). That is surely a foundation of that copy-culture.
Those copycats are clearly an annoyance. But even such a clone of an unrestricted site can serve it's purpose: Target a specific market (someone pointed out that a difference between those sites are the amount of pictures of woman, which could be caused by cultural difference - USA censors sex, Germany censors violence).
But you guys are ALL missing the real story. The real story is that while the user photos on Pinterest are a mash of guys, cartoons, couples, baby photos, and a couple of hot girls, 90% of Pinspire's user photos are hot girls.
I wonder why? I think the secret sauce that really makes these cloners zoom involves astro-turfing.
Anyone else see the irony in the post? At the bottom of the post, it discloses that the source of this news is @RWW (rww.to/yPPAj9) ... who is going to get the Hacker News traffic? The original creator of this news or the one that... re-blogged it. Just sayin'
People live in a fantasy world if they think you can build something and you won't be copied - regardless if laws exist against it or not. It's just the nature of the business, and it has always been like that. The only solution is to be the one that truly understands his customers, leads the market, and is always one step ahead of his competition, and you will be rewarded for it.
Every single competitor in every single industry is more or less a clone of the "originator" (which probably based his product on something else, too) and then they "copy" each other's features.
So this is sort of like someone marketing your idea internationally without your blessing, and then coming to see you once they have traction and saying "hey you can spend money and do this yourself, and go up against us, or you can spend money to buy up what we've done and benefit from our experience and traction and hit the ground running"..
I see the downside, being forced into making a deal that maybe isn't on your terms, but if the price is right (versus doing it yourself - internationalization isn't that obvious) then I wonder if some companies just do it gladly (the acquisition)..
The Samwer Brothers seemed to have made a fortune from "go away" money. I don't think they ever really have an intention of running these sites for a time.
I have no experience with any of the rest of their ripoff sites, but Wimdu sucks. I mean, hard. Read just their front page copy, never mind digging deeper.
We got calls from idiots perpetually asking us to sign up with them - through many, many requests to knock it off. It's the phone equivalent of the spam Airbnb got pinned on last year. The especially stupid part was that we already were.
Of what though? I think this is a natural phenomenon that will happen in any competitive environment. The guys doing it are scumbags, but there's nothing to beware because there's nothing you can do to prevent it.
is pinterest really localized at all? i get how something like airBnB merits an international clone, but how does an international version of pinterest do anything that regular pinterest doesn't?
Never heard of Pinterest before, so had to Google for it. Andrew your sympathies clearly lie with Pinterest, so you might want to provide a link to it to (instead of Pinspire, which you have helpfully linked to).
I'd agree this is terrible but also say I've seen Silicon Valley startups look at a hot web property in Asia or Europe and clone it, raise a lot of money and take credit for it a number of times.
Pinterest isn't even publicly available yet. Maybe the fact that someone cloned them so quickly will make them get off their asses and make it available to everyone.
'Not being public' is an 'exclusivity club' ploy to make new members want to join and be apart of the fun.. The Winklevoss Brothers' idea of exclusivity for Harvar / .edu emails helped Facebook similarly with initial growth.
Yep. It's cheap and stupid. Why bother waiting for my pinterest invite when I can sign up for pinspire right now?
Given that network effects are most important for a startup like this, it's quite possible that the clone can overtake the original in a short amount of time.
I agree it "sucks" however I do not agree it should be "illegal" We would just end up with SOPA 2.0
Seriously can you imagine the chilling effect it would have if it were made illegal?
Facebook would never have made it under that kind of law because they would have claimed it was a knockoff of Myspace/friendster/hi5/ "insert social network here".
