Brush my shoulders off (read all 7 entries…)
The copycats respond

Dear Josh Petersen,

thank you very much for your email.

Based on a market research we decided to redesign our website 2 weeks ago because of the fact that a large proportion of the German users don`t understand our original idea: “to match people and their goals and help them to achieve these goals”. The average German user is not familiar with concepts like technorati, meetup, et al. As a conclusion we will improve the user guidance and add more serious content. A comparison between your and our website has shown that a few users see similarities concerning the homepage but not concerning second level sites. Nevertheless, the redesigned website will be very much different on all levels and since we are already working on the new design you are kindly invited to visit our website in 2-3 weeks but please understand that we donĀ“t see the necessity for any kind of “reporting”.

Best Regards from Germany
David Kuczek / Dr. Berit Ernst



Comments:

Thanks Harald

I do appreciate you getting in touch. I wrote to David saying that we are flattered by the imitation, and it was our hunch that the folks were enthusiasts – but we think aimido would do better working from original ideas and not from ours.

We’ll definitely give them a chance – but the mail I got today didn’t seem terribly honest.

Thanks again for letting us know who you are – it makes the whole thing feel better just to know there is a person on the other end and they are listening to you.

You’re welcome.

And I will do my best to make sure that on Monday the very first thing aimido will do is put a prominent link on the home page saying something like “inspired by de.43things.com”.

After that as soon as possible we (here it’s “we” again, because I definitely do have some new ideas, which I’d love the aimido team to implement) will change not only the look & feel, but the concept of the site … maybe some time in the future there’s some kind of cooperation waiting for us.

Have a nice weekend!

CG is not a gadget

Harald, well done.

Implementation, not ideas

As someone involved with such a large project, I just felt I should clarify that it’s not “ideas”, as such, people shouldn’t take/use.. but implementations of ideas. These guys pretty much took your implementation of an idea, which is wrong, but there’s nothing at all wrong with them making a site based on the same “idea” as long as their implementation is unique.

Actually, I’ve just now seen you talk about this briefly on David’s weblog, so ignore this message, but I’ll leave it up here anyway! :)


 

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