Microblogging startup Plurk took note of Microsoft’s apology, in which the software company took responsibility over the blatant rip-off of the startup’s design and code for a competing service in China.
Microsoft was quick to blame a third-party vendor for cutting a few corners here and there when developing the beta service (MSN Juku), and promptly yanked it off the Web.
But as far as Plurk’s concerned, that’s not where the story ends. → Read More
About 24 hours ago news broke that Microsoft China appeared to rip off both the look and feel as well as much of the code of a microblogging service called Plurk. Last night they issued a statement saying they took the Juku site down, and suggested an outside contractor was to blame.
Today they issued a final statement on the matter. This boils down to “it wasn’t us, it was our vendor.” But they do take responsibility, and apologize to Plurk. The apology is nice but largely unnecessary. As we said yesterday, this is the best thing to ever happen to the startup.
Microsoft’s statement: → Read More
Early this morning we wrote about what appears to be a blatant rip off of Plurk by Microsoft China. Microsoft’s Juku product looks almost exactly like Plurk, and the code appears to almost identical.
Now, more than twelve hours later, Microsoft still has no real response to the situation. It was the middle of the night in China when the story broke, and Microsoft says that they are just now working with their team there to “track down the information.” In the meantime, Juku is being taken down: → Read More
Microblogging startup Plurk may not have become hugely popular in these parts, where Twitter rules the lands, but it has been making strides in Asia. Recently, the fledgling company has gotten a feared competitor in the space with the launch of MSN Juku in China by the local Microsoft subsidiary, in a country where Plurk has notably been blocked since April this year.
But the software giant may well have cut a few corners here and there to get their service up and running, and has seemingly turned to outright theft of code and design elements of Plurk to launch in a hurry.
The design of MSN Juku sure has the same looks as Plurk, as you can tell from the screenshots below. But according to a blog post by the microblogging startup, there’s more going on that just design inspiration: → Read More
Plurk, a micro-messaging service similar to Twitter, today added a nice new feature: Real-time conversation search. As you might expect, it allows you to search Plurk’s growing index of data to find out what people are saying about a topic right now. In its post on the matter, Plurk goes into how it thinks this is the next phase of search beyond the traditional search engines, and how social search could revolutionize things. Of course, it fails to mention its number one competitor in the field: Twitter.
Plurk, which launched about a year ago, differentiates itself from Twitter mainly in its look and feel. It emphasizes a horizontal scrolling timeline rather than a vertical one. Plurk also gives users set verbs to use for their updates, such as, “parislemon LOVES real-time search.” That’s all well and good, but Twitter still has the users — a lot more of them. Plurk notes that it’s been growing every day since its launch, and is close to seeing its 1 billionth aggregate responses, but that is nothing compared to the company it won’t mention in its post. → Read More
As micro-messaging spreads overseas, the threat of censorship looms in certain parts of the world. Yesterday Plurk, a micro-messaging service that competes with Twitter, discovered that it is being blocked in China. According to Plurk’s lead developer Amir Salihefendic, “We at Plurk still don’t know why we are banned and we did not get any warnings from the Chinese government or have been in contact with them.” But a quick test confirms that the site is not available in China. → Read More
