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Startup Claims Google Copied Web-Annotation Product
An anonymous reader writes "Web annotation startup ReframeIt claim Google copied their web annotation product when releasing Google Sidewiki. At first glance, the products do look quite similar, and this eWeek article has some interesting evidence, including suspicious user registrations by Google employees and an attempt by Google to hire off ReframeIt's lead engineer."
A month after we implemented it, Google came out with the same thing. At first, the boss' reaction was "See how good an idea it was?" Of course, the idea turned out to be a turkey ("McDonalds food tastes like shit" was one of the first comments for mcdonalds.com).
It's still a shitty idea.
All I have to go on are are quotes like "suspicious user registrations by Google employees" and two browser-based applications that have a similar goal and layout. But Google is the big guy and the startup is the little guy. So...Google is evil. I have barely anything that resembles a fact, but I know the truth of it!
WTF does "suspicious user registrations by Google employees" supposed to mean? Google has over 22,000 full-time employees (who knows how many part-time). I'm willing to bet that a decent percentage of them are web savvy because...well..that's what they do. Also, how do they know that certain registrations are Google employees? Probably because they users' email was @google.com. So, let's see if I have this straight, Google decided to steal this startups (fairly obvious) idea and couldn't be bothered to at least hide it by using gmail.com and not google.com? Or maybe Yahoo! or Hotmail. Right...
As for the interface. I did RTFA and they mentioned (with picture in a link) that both apps have the same general set of buttons and similarities in their interface. It's a freakin' application that does one simple thing, it annotates web pages It's not an application that say, allows you to edit 3D objects and has a bajillion buttons (witness Blender). That's a couple of buttons and a couple of textboxes. Oh, and as to how the button arrangements are similar: the cancel button and the submit buttons are side-by-side, with the cancel on the left. Someone call the police! That's a smokin' gun right there!
I'm not saying that Google didn't steal this app, but everything so far is circumstantial at best.
Seriously. I'm not the brightest spark in the wire, but I had an idea for this 10 years ago, and even an implementation limited to a small online fan community. It never took off because the community essentially imploded and died. It used some clever JavaScript, that's about all I remember about it. These people have nothing to complain about, this idea has probably been considered by thousands and their implementation just happened to come second in the contest.
But they didn't. Reframeit is the one who went to Google. Reframeit is the one who asked them to look their site (thus explaining the registrations coming from google employees).
And how many employees does Reframeit even have? One or two? Shouldn't it be natural for Google to simply assume that those one or two guys who came to them and asked them to take a look at their site -- simply wanted to get a job at Google?
Like I've said before, reframeit doesn't even make the top ten of any list I've seen (if you can actually find one where reframeit does appear -- I'll eat my words of course. I can admit when I'm wrong).
This was part of the original idea in Ted Nelson's Xanadu design in the 1960s, the original hypertext system. The user interface where you match the comments to what they are about was also in his system - at that point represented in a demo by 3x5" cards and string, as far as I remember.