“What you going to do when they come for you”
This is an article about Technology posted Jan 28.
Pinterest is on a tear… their traffic is exploding… money’s pouring in from VC’s… things are looking up. Then, they get cloned… Not once, but twice… the cleverly named Pinspire by two particular German brothers – the similarities are, striking. And then, Chill goes off to do their social video thing (with a site that looked TOTALLY different) and now they’re copying Pinterest as well!!! Craziness!!!
Chill actually is like a combination of several sites… Canv.as with the emoticons and Pinterest for the layout and design – like a crazy, viral YouTube..
In fact, a lot of these new designs are sporting the whole multi-column, homepage design. I’ve seen it on Mahalo a year ago… Canvas also had it a while back… MySpace tried to steal it from Pinterest as well… Tumblr has multiple themes that sport that grid-based look.. Even WordPress themes can sport that design as well.
And then the popularity of the “repost” as promoted by Tumblr and Twitter (with Twitter being the first I think!!!), it adds an additional element of viral!!!
In fact, even Backplane is taking a page out of a bunch of these startups as well!!! With the grid-like media view, the emotions, the drawing and mockups built in… Viral… focused on fans…
Are these sites copying each other? I mean, that’s like saying all of the blogging platforms are copying one another because they all present information in a reverse-chronological order… which, when I say that, I mean.. duh – that’s what the blogging template calls for, typically…
Or it’s like saying online media companies are all copying one another when they all use featured content boxes and have this very typical “magazine” like layout…
True, Pinspire is a complete clone of Pinterest, with the idea that they’ll one day need to pay up and acquire their European clone as a user acquisition deal… but all’s fair in love and building startups.
As for the overall design “borrowing”… it’s common… get over it… if design is your competitive advantage, you had better get ready for some competition.. you’d better have a business model that doesn’t crumble when someone else copies from of your front end UI…
So the moral from the story – people will steal your designs – get used to it. Hopefully you have something a little more defensible in your business model than an interesting UI/UX.
Summary
- People will steal your ideas and your design. Have a stronger competitive advantage than pixels on a screen.