Practicalmadness

I’ll have (lots) more to say about the new Google App Engine later on, but for now I want to weigh in on the eerie similarity between HuddleChat, the Google-developed App Engine case study, and 37signals’s Campfire, an app which I frequently describe in all seriousness as the greatest HTML-based software interface ever designed.

Like so many other Web technologies, real-time chat isn’t especially unique or proprietary. Sure, there are ways chat is implemented that can be patented, but in practical terms no one can really claim ownership over the concept of passing little bits of text around at subatomic speeds — hell, the whole internet is to some extent based on that concept. So when it comes to chat programs, the factors that matter — which distinguish one product from another, and which therefore should be considered proprietary — are user interface design and feature set. And by all indications, HuddleChat has ripped off Campfire in every way that matters.

I’m having to go by my sources here, since I can’t find a way to log into HuddleChat right now, which (hopefully) means Google’s left hand just caught onto what their right hand was doing and pulled the thing offline. But still, this is a major product launch, their first and biggest response to Amazon’s growing presence in utility computing. And somehow no one — not in PR, not in marketing, not in development — realized that their way-cool example app was a rip-off of not just another company’s product, but one of the coolest products from one of the best-known companies out there.

Even ignoring the depraved indifference to 37signals’s intellectual property rights that seems to be afoot here, this is just bad staff work. The App Engine could represent a sea change in the way apps are developed and hosted, the spark that moves all of us from building our own hosting stacks and having to be as much sysadmins as developers. To let that message be overshadowed by three morons’ utter lack of creativity and proper supervision is just staggeringly stupid.

Update: Nope, it’s still around, I just didn’t find a working link to it until 8 PM Central. And then around 9 PM Google took it offline for realsies:

Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we’ve decided to take it down.

Of course, I’d say it should never have been put up to begin with (at least not with the Google seal of approval), but this is at least a head fake towards contrition.