Retweet Flattery
You know you are doing something right when people start copying you! It is said that copying is the sincerest form of flattery, so when I did my daily read of the tech blogs this morning I was of course interested to read on Techcrunch that retweet.com will soon be entering the fray and that it looked suspiciously like TweetMeme.
I had actually been contacted by their COO Tyson Quick in April to ask if we would support their plan to get twitter to support retweeting natively on Twitter. At the time I responded that I would think about it, in fact what I thought was that they were obviously trying to get us to help them promote a service that would at a later stage turn into a competitor, so I ignored it.
What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.
We are happy for others to learn from our endeavors and flattered by the copying but some of our more complex JavaScript was obfuscated to deter others from attempting to re-use our code. We take a dim view of trying to pass off our code especially when it is attempting to create a competitor.
We our seeking further legal advice and will be pursuing every avenue to protect the hard work of our team.
Tweetmeme accuses Retweet.com of stealing its code on July 27th, 2009
[...] Nick an email to ask if he had anything to say about it. He didn’t reply to my email, and now I think I know why. Look what Nick just posted on the Tweetmeme blog: What caught my attention was that some [...]
Defending Its Turf, TweetMeme Is Already Threatening To Sue ReTweet on July 27th, 2009
[...] What bugs him is what he claims to be almost exact copying of code. Halstead writes on the TweetMeme blog: What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment [...]
mikerbrt on July 27th, 2009
Hey, the whole Twitter community will support you for defending your copyrights
Aaron on July 27th, 2009
Are you seriously going to sue over a dozen lines of generic JavaScript?
Perhaps that’s a sign that you don’t really have a business, just a feature.
Good luck with *all that* though.
Nick Halstead on July 27th, 2009
Aaron,
This goes way beyond ‘20 lines of javascript’
Rival Twitter aggregator apps square off | Design Website Blog on July 27th, 2009
[...] specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead, ReTweet’s “retweet button Javascript and the [...]
Retweet.com removes offending code after Tweetmeme plagiarism accusations | GeekStream on July 27th, 2009
[...] Halstead writes on his blog: What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and … Read the whole story on VentureBeat No Related Post Loading… @import url("http://www.google.com/uds/css/gsearch.css"); window._uds_vbw_donotrepair = true; @import url("http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/videobar/gsvideobar.css"); .playerInnerBox_gsvb .player_gsvb { width : 320px; height : 260px; } function LoadVideoBar() { var videoBar; var options = { largeResultSet : !true, horizontal : true, autoExecuteList : { cycleTime : GSvideoBar.CYCLE_TIME_MEDIUM, cycleMode : GSvideoBar.CYCLE_MODE_LINEAR, executeList : ["ytchannel:channelintel","ytchannel:thegadgetshow","ytchannel:phonescoop","ytchannel:thinkgeek"] } } videoBar = new GSvideoBar(document.getElementById("videoBar-bar"), GSvideoBar.PLAYER_ROOT_FLOATING, options); } // arrange for this function to be called during body.onload // event processing GSearch.setOnLoadCallback(LoadVideoBar); [...]
Retweet.com removes offending code after Tweetmeme plagiarism accusations | UpOff.com on July 27th, 2009
[...] Halstead writes on his blog: What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours. [...]
Rival Twitter aggregator apps square off | Technology News on July 27th, 2009
[...] specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead, ReTweet’s "retweet button Javascript and the [...]
Kevin Mesiab on July 27th, 2009
Where exactly does it go, Nick?
Twitter apps war | TweetMeme Retweet | The Tech News Blog on July 27th, 2009
[...] a post on Tweetmeem’s blog, Nick Halstead explains how ‘flattered’ he is, to find someone copying his idea. [...]
BeatSmash on July 28th, 2009
TweetMeme is merely afraid of competition. If someone copied my JavaScript code I wouldn’t care, it’s not like they hacked into your servers and stole backend code.
Stop being such babies.You know Retweet has an awesome domain name and you’ll try and stop them launching a service (even if they didn’t copy JavaScript code).
Good luck with the court case. Most judges haven’t even heard of the Internet, let alone JavaScript,
Rival Twitter aggregator apps square off - Programming Blog on July 28th, 2009
[...] specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead, ReTweet’s “retweet button Javascript and the [...]
Ly Technology » Retweet.com removes offending code after Tweetmeme plagiarism accusations on July 28th, 2009
[...] Halstead writes on his blog: What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours. [...]
Tweetmeme accuses Retweet.com of stealing its code on July 28th, 2009
[...] Nick an email to ask if he had anything to say about it. He didn’t reply to my email, and now I think I know why. Look what Nick just posted on the Tweetmeme blog: What caught my attention was that some [...]
The Far Edge » Blog Archive » Defending Its Turf, TweetMeme Is Already Threatening To Sue ReTweet on July 28th, 2009
[...] It is not so much the apparent flat-out copying of TweetMeme’s Website design (ReTweet has not even launched in private beta yet), that bothers him. After all, TweetMeme itself was highly “inspired” by another news aggregator, Techmeme. What bugs him is what he claims to be almost exact copying of code. Halstead writes on the TweetMeme blog: [...]
Rival Twitter aggregator apps square off | The Kansas Progress on July 28th, 2009
[...] specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead, ReTweet’s “retweet button Javascript and the [...]
Retweet.com’s reputation will be permanently stained by the Tweetmeme affair on July 28th, 2009
[...] to this, Nick Halstead from Tweetmeme investigated himself. Evidently, he was not happy with what he found. Nick accused Retweet.com of directly copying Tweetmeme’s code, and indicated that he was [...]
Retweet.com’s reputation will be permanently stained by the Tweetmeme affair on July 28th, 2009
[...] to this, Nick Halstead from Tweetmeme investigated himself. Evidently, he was not happy with what he found. Nick accused Retweet.com of directly copying Tweetmeme’s code, and indicated that he was [...]
Updated: Tweetmeme accuses Retweet.com of stealing its code on July 28th, 2009
[...] Nick an email to ask if he had anything to say about it. He didn’t reply to my email, and now I think I know why. Look what Nick just posted on the Tweetmeme blog: What caught my attention was that some [...]
Updated: Retweet.com’s reputation will be permanently stained by the Tweetmeme affair on July 28th, 2009
[...] to this, Nick Halstead from Tweetmeme investigated himself. Evidently, he was not happy with what he found. Nick accused Retweet.com of directly copying Tweetmeme’s code, and indicated that he was [...]
Rival Twitter aggregator apps square off | Mac Bargains on July 29th, 2009
[...] specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead, ReTweet’s “retweet button Javascript and the [...]
Mirco on August 19th, 2009
Retweet.com ist copy your code again..see the Screen:
http://twittersmash.com/retweet-klaut-technik-und-code-von-tweetmeme/
This is the submit function.
web: Retweet.com is No Competition for Tweetmeme | Alseek:The Academic Search Engine on August 21st, 2009
[...] aggregator application Retweet.com which went live earlier this week. Apparently, the company snagged the code for both their retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin from their rival and current top [...]