140Char

Is Microsoft China’s MSN Juku a straight theft of code and design from Plurk, the microblogging service which has had major success in the Asian world?

Despite fading after initial interest in the West, Plurk now claims to be ten times bigger than Twitter in Taiwan alone, and the preferred method of microblogging in many Asian countries, despite access to the site being banned by China in April 2009. At the time, Plurk’s top five countries were Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, the U.S and China, so it was a big issue.

Now the issue has got even bigger, as described in a blog post by Plurk co-founder and lead developer, Amir, which states what they think has happened:

• Microsoft China officially launched its own microblogging service, MSN Juku/Hompy/Mclub, some time in November, 2009.
• The service’s design and UI is by and large an EXACT copy of Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigation system.
• Some 80% of the client and product codebase appears to be stolen directly from Plurk!
• Plurk was never approached nor collaborated in any capacity with MS on this service.
• As a young startup, we’re stunned, shocked, and unsure what to do next and need your support and suggestions.

And judging by the images and code displayed on the Plurk blog, it seems far too suspicious to be a mere coincidence.

Spot the difference:

And again…

And once more with feeling:

It’s pretty amazing that a company of the size of Microsoft China would even think about stealing code to power a new launch, and that it’s gone this far if so. The only logical reason could be that China’s internet laws and lack of access to the outside world could lead to people thinking no-one would notice.

The question the Plurk team is asking is how to tackle the problem?

My guess is that the bad publicity wouldn’t necessarily worry Microsoft China, but might worry Microsoft itself a little more, particularly given all the efforts to fight Chinese piracy and protect intellectual property that Microsoft has supported. It’s a big harder to do that when you’ve got a clone of a reasonably well-established and successful company sitting there for all to see.

Techcrunch has also covered the story, and I’m looking forward to seeing what, if any, response they get from Microsoft.

My guess will be that MSN Juku will go quiet for a while, before perhaps reappearing with a slightly more unique codebase and design. If not, perhaps the only other option will be for Microsoft to get into acquisition mode – something that didn’t work out well for Google and Jaiku, and isn’t likely to work when the starting point is a complete rip-off!

Update: The outcome is that yes it’s a clone, but apparently done by a third party developer when everyone else was obviously on holiday or in a meeting. The site has been taken offline indefinitely, and the only remaining question is whether Plurk, which is a pretty small and young startup, will bother to try and take matters further, which given the legal resources MSN has, is probably unlikely…

I know Friday is the traditional day for a round-up post, but so much happens in the microblogosphere on a daily basis, all the 140char team have been busy, and Monday gives some nice alliteration:

• Some stats from Twitter on how the new SMS rules have affected UK Outbound SMS usage:

• Zygotweet and tweetSMS plan to offer Twitter via SMS in the UK (Via Twitterholics)
• Useful and interesting list and stats for newspapers on Twitter (Well, American ones!).
• Jaiku got hit by a power failure at the data center provider for their web servers earlier today, but is back online.
• Plurk has had some minor design and usability upgrades.
• Pownce has integrated FireEagle, which means all your uploads and messages can now be automatically geo-tagged with your location.
• Tumblr now allows you to search within Tumblelogs.
• And Seesmic has a new and improved search function, and threaded player. The improvements to the player make it more and more a mini-application for your website and blog, which now lets you: -start a new conversation straight from where you are without having to leave the site, -reply to any video in private and not only in public. -post to twitter the link from your reply.

So not too much has happened!

It seems as if there are a million Twitter applications, widgets, and ways to publicise your membership and latest Tweets, but things are a bit twickier when it comes to Plurk.

So far, there has been an unofficial API, and third party Plurk tools are thin on the ground. But even more annoyingly, I can’t use the official Plurk widget.

There’s a simple reason. They offer it for users to embed into a Facebook, Myspace, or blog page. But they’ve fixed the width, so trying to display it on this blog, for instance, means the sidebar will be blown apart. And the width is set at 300 pixels wide – way too much for most pages on Facebook or Myspace.

So for the moment, I’ll not be sharing my Plurking as much as my Tweeting.

You can still find me on Twitter. And on Plurk.

Blimey, things are definitely starting to happen outside of Plurk. First came the first Plurk Facebook app, Plurksync, which updates your status with your most recent Plurk. Unfortunately it’s likely to suffer the same problem as status updates via Twitter, when you end up seeing the same message across every service an individual uses.

Although my favourite incident with linking microblogging and Facebook saw friend and colleague David Cushman in a surreal, endless loop of updates between Twitter and Facebook.

And now comes the unofficial, reverse-engineered, not supported by the Plurk team API, RLPLurkAPI provided by Ryan Lim.

Oh, and from the official Plurk blog comes the news that they’ve tweaked the Karma points.

One of the great things about the current web revolution is that as soon as a website/application appears, someone clever figures out ways to tweak it to improve on it for their needs.

And so, as many people are discovering Plurk, TwisterMC aka Thomas McMahon, has already created a sidebar plugin for Firefox 2 and 3, to use the simplified mobile version of Plurk.

It comes with the Plurk logo of a headless ‘thing’ and a keyboard shortcut. The actual functionality of the sidebar is down to Plurk, and it’s being download right now for a test.

I’ve seen a couple of rumours that Plurk’s creators are too keen on third party applications being developed – perhaps down to Twitter’s downtime problems and the fact 90% of requests to Twitters database comes from external applications. But we’ll see…

Dan Thornton on Plurk.

Julius Solaris on Plurk

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Welcome to a new resource for discussion, debate, resources and tools for the microblogging world. It used to be all about Twitter. Then Seesmic came along. Now Plurk is here.

Microblogging is here to stay. And that doesn’t mean every single person in the world will be on Twitter – but it does mean that many, many websites and services will be integrating some type of microblogging into their offerings…

That makes it more than worthy of our time and effort, we hope you agree!