Google Takes Down HuddleChat After Complaints [Warning]

desmondhaynes writes "There were striking similarities between one of Google's App Engine demos, HuddleChat (a real-time chat application) and the Campfire app from 37Signals. Google has taken HuddleChat down from the App Engine app gallery." Google explains: 'The App Engine team was looking for some sample apps to help kick the tires on their new system, so we invited Googlers to build some as side projects. A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent web chat would do the trick. We've heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.'" We noted the launch of Google's App Engine yesterday.

Update: 04/10 14:51 GMT by KD : A reader wrote in to warn that the link in this article is infected. Windows users beware, and have your AV up-to-date.

Whiners

[Anonymous Coward]

If your business model is based on such a trivial application, why should anyone care if you fail?

37Signals should learn to innovate, not whine

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want it make it big by offering minimalism don't be surprised when someone does exactly the same thing. The 37 Signals developers and DHH should be ashamed of themselves for claiming huddlechat is a rip off, it is an obvious idea and plenty of other websites had implemented similar chat system BEFORE campfire ever came around.

It is funny how a company who sells a book on design philsophy complains when someone else uses that philosophy.

If you deliberately make featureless software don't be surprised when people "copy" it, even as a tech demo.

Compete and Innovate.

IRC rip-off?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Persistent web chat," eh -- the idea sounds so novel, I'm sure they must have pirated source code straight from "campfire" -- unless this is just a web frontend to IRC, like yahoo! chat or something like that.

What's the big friggin' deal? Not that I've ever even heard of Campfire anyway, but it doesn't sound unique in any meaningful way.

and first post.

Please help me out here

[Fuzuli]

I'm not sure I am getting the reason for taking this app down. Really. If I were to clone an app to demonstrate a new platform, would that be a problem? So, what is the possibility of Google taking down google docs, in response to complaints from MS, or some other online office software provider?
No bad intentions here, I just don't get it. Care to enlighten me?

I don't see the problem.

[maciarc]

They both look like chat apps. How many different ways is there to show a chat window, a text entry box and a list of people in the room?

Campfire is hardly innovative

[tolan-b]

It's just a nice web interface to a chat room, hardly revolutionary. Anyone getting hot under the collar about someone copying it has a great future ahead of them in the patent troll business.

Sure if they copied it exactly feature for feature and took the interface then it's understandable but otherwise...

Re:Please help me out here

[MozeeToby]

I think they pulled the app mostly for PR reasons; not that the app generated tons of bad PR but that it was distracting people from what google wanted them talking about. Rather than argue about their right to have the app, they simply pulled it so people wouldn't be able to argue about it on the blogosphere.

Re:37Signals should learn to innovate, not whine

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I followed this controversy and frankly the issue is that both huddlechat and campfire look exactly like many of the AIM clients out there. They have the same layout and very similar features. They even look like toned down MSN chat applications. If you design to the style du-jour it is totally likely that you will look similar especially in a similar arena, chat clients. I think the issue here is that the domain is so minimal that any client who tries the bare minimum of ajax web chat with file uploads will end up being the same. So I guess 37signals is claiming they somehow own the minimal implementation. Well they don't, it is an obvious idea and they should buck up.

How are either of these anything new?

[phpmysqldev]

Based on this article I think I will make a low feature program that allows people to look at remote "pages" and view them in a standardized format. Yes, yes similar things have been done before, but my product will be sub par and do nothing revolutionary.

And if anyone else tries to "copy" that Ill go after them with a vengeance.

Re:Please help me out here

[kingcool1432]

they simply pulled it so people wouldn't be able to argue about it on the blogosphere.

Front page on Slashdot. Wow, they sure dodged that bullet.

huh?

[apodyopsis]

I applaud them for their principled stand, but I ridicule them for this decision. It was surely taken in the interests of staving off a good 'ole web flaming then any sensible grounds. There are so many of these applications of this style and format around that I find it hard buy their argument.

And I, for one, would find this kind of demo application extremely interesting. It always interesting to see how these things are done.

Bottom line - I think there is nothing intrinsically special with this kind of application, any of us with a modest amount of programming experience could of knocked it up. It is always interested to see a standard basic application in a new system as a common ground to allow ease of adoption. For that reason there is a bunch of "hello worlds", "simple graphs" and so forth. On a web development system you would expect by the same argument to see "tables", "blogs", "portals" and the "simple chat" as their demos. This is like MS trying to stop the notepad demo that comes with some windows compilers, or LiveJournal trying to stop the blog demo that came with GWT. Totally Daft.

Go on, reinstate it!

They should have made the code available

[jocknerd]

It would have been nice to see the code for a "real" working app on App Engine.

Re:Please help me out here

[PitaBred]

Yup. But their statement made the front page too. Which is the important bit... WHY they took it down.

Re:I don't see the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

What bunk! All minimalist designs are going to look similar. The watches shown are not minimalist. Their chat has just the barest number of elements required to function as a chat program. Of course any other simple implementation is going to look similar. Google's chat is a trivial implementation. Just like all "normal" clocks look the same. No one "stole" his design. There was no serious design in the first place.

Re:37Signals should learn to innovate, not whine

[Seumas]

I'm not familiar with either app, so perhaps I'm missing something. However, how can they get all stirred up over it? Can ONLY "Remember The Milk" do to-do lists on line? Can ONLY Amazon do sales online? Can ONLY Google do spreadsheets on line?

Seriously, unless the Google version clearly took a trademark or other creative content from them *or* literally took actual CODE from them, then who the hell cares?

Whiney Ruby bastards.

If it was MS instead of Google...

[qaam]

I'm surprised most slashdotters seem to think that Google was in the right here. Let's leave out Google's name and see how the story sounds:

A company with over 10,000 employees duplicates a 10 person company's product feature for feature, even down to the animation effects, and gives it away for free.

Substitute MS for Google in this story and slashdotters would be flaming mad. It's not that Google just created a similar chat app to Campfire, it's that they created a carbon clone of Campfire, which is despicable no matter the company that does the cloning. The argument that Google's not responsible, since they're just hosting, is bogus. Google employees created this clone, meaning that it's Google's property.

Re:Please help me out here

[Anonymous Coward]

They *exactly* copied our hard work.

The article shows a side by side comparison. It's not even close to an exact copy. As far as I can tell, it's not even a copy at all. If anyone made a chat client, I'd expect it to look very similar.

It doesn't seem fair that someone can trivially copy something that takes so much time and effort. Good design should be rewarded and encouraged.

Lots of people work very hard doing all sorts of things and don't get a government monopoly. Suffocating the free market with all sort of government rules designed to reward the few people you think are cool just costs everyone a fortune and penalizes plenty of people who don't deserve to be punished.

Re:IRC rip-off?

[Hatta]

If you just need a persistent IRC session, use irssi & screen. It can't be beat.

Re:Whiners

[easyTree]

* Warning: similarity detected between two things contained within the universe. Lawyers are being dispatched to your location. do - not - move! *

*Sigh* - 'Tired of the "this idea is mine and noone else's" now. Please stop.
 

Re:Whiners

[easyTree]

I'm mean really, how far would football as 'sport' have gotten if every team was required to have their own shape of ball? Yes, I realise the USAnians have already made a start on this :D but at least they share the ball between two parties; both of whom have several indirect common goals.

Whatever happened to:
  a) 'hey, look what I can do'
  b) 'cool; if I take what you did and add *this*..'
  c) 'omg yeah, waaay cool'
  d) goto b

now it's:
a) 'hey, look what I can do'
b) 'cool; if I take what you did and add *this*..'
c) 'you little bitch, you STOLE MY idea. now ur gonna pay'
d) goto jail :S

Re:If it was MS instead of Google...

[qaam]

Good points. I applaud Google for acting responsibly here by taking down HuddleChat quickly. In general Google is a "good" company; they certainly don't deserve the "shit" treatment in the way that MS does.

Google had two engineers in their off time who copied an extremely generic idea and placed it in their gallery of "look what you can do with this new toy we have!" and took it down when it became apparent that there would be hard feelings over it.

I agree that Campfire is a totally generic idea; however, its execution is not. Of course it only took Google employees two weeks to copy Campfire... after all, the Google guys didn't have to do any thought, they just had to bang out code to do mimic Campfire's ideas. How long would it take for two Google employees to create a carbon clone of facebook? Maybe four weeks, maybe five. How long would it take for you to create your own Jackson Pollock?

The point is: it's the creative thought that's the hard part, not actually executing an idea. People who defend Google's actions by claiming that Campfire is "generic" don't realize how much work actually goes in to designing a product.

Another reply said that I must work at 37 Signals. No. I'm a happy PhD student; I don't want to be a code monkey because cranking out code to do exactly what someone else's spec says is thoughtless.

Re:Please help me out here

[randyest]

Judging by the side-by-side shot in the article, I'd say your use of the word "exactly" is unwarranted. Moreover, I'd challenge you to show or describe a UI for such a simple chat tool that looks less like yours than the one google made.