I guess romanians are the most proficient at plagiarism, out of all the people out there. GsmArena.com has been stolen by Gsmland.ro. Neogen.ro stole Google and Live. Stole Yahoo Now it's Digg's turn to be stolen by these sorry asses. Damn it... people like these, put the rest of us in the same pot, as far as other people think.
The digg (clone) script has been released with the same design, there is hundreds of them right now with the exact same design and function, however the other websites seem like pretty solid clones. Business is business though.
I could clone digg or google or whatever but without the traffic whats the point? They say imitation is the highest form of flattery.........
You have to plan for this to happen. The tech market has always been a bunch of pirates. Digg and shoutwire are begging to be ripped and done CORRECTLY because they have massive flaws. I have had a lot of my sites douplicated but they die off pretty fast. I always welcome competition though... keeps me on my toes.
Not to mention the site that copied them isn't even in English so its not like they would start stealing market share
Right. Have been and always will be. That's why in the .RO space, i and my coleagues at the Seopdia Forum (romanian lang.) are trying to expose each and every romanian website we find that SPAMS or PLAGIATES. I have a project ready at Fight Plagiarism org. Will be launched soon. Damn plagiators. Nothing is flawless man. Not even NASA. Not even Microsoft. You just can't protect 100%. There will always be a smart-ass who knows how to do it the "other way". You were lucky. In Romania, the Neogen company stole from Live, Yahoo, Google, Google News, Firefox, Adsense, and MANY many other, like 100% identical designs and functionalities. Now the company has grown to one of the largest in Romania with 000,000 USD business figures. And you say : Hey it's in another language. No ... It's not just that. It's about the fact that they stole and based their online business on already researched and proved to be sucessfull design and fucntionality. This made the succes for them. By steeling other's ideeas. By not beeing creative. And they DID had the resources to be. Btw Shoe ... I read your blog every day. It's great. Keep it up You have a few words in my above statement. be steeling they just took over an entire regional industry. 2,5 million Euro for online advertising (made in 2005) is not to be taken litely. This company had at least 10% of that.
I don't actually believe that though. If people were using that site instead of Digg it is purely because it caters to them in their own language. Those are people that probably wouldn't stick with Digg anyway. Also, they have nowhere near the traffic. A recent front page got me 20,000 uniques in 2 days. I wouldn't bother submitting to the other site because I can tell you wouldn't get much just by the fact that 5 diggs gets you the front page.
You would be amazed Actually, in my above post i was reffering to the www.neogen.ro website. Not to the website that stole Digg's design