The 10 Most Blatant Design Ripoffs in Social Media

http://mashable.com/2012/01/31/10-blatant-social-media-design-ripoffs/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter#view_as_one_page-gallery_box4095

Pinspire vs. Pinterest

It doesn't get more blatant than this. Pinspire is pretty much a pixel-for-pixel Pinterest clone, created by the serial digital ripoff artists at Rocket Internet. It's a bit obscene just how much of a copycat Pinspire is -- from concept to functionality to the cursive-style logo. Will it be as lucrative for the Rocket's Sawmer Brothers as their other projects, an eBay clone they sold to the real auction site for $50 million or the European deals site that Groupon gobbled up? Or will someone finally serve them with a cease-and-desist letter? If that happens, someone please pin it.

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Heello vs. Twitter

Founded by the guy who created Twitpic, Heello doesn't just look like Twitter. It works exactly the same, just renaming tweets as pings, retweets as echoes and followers as listeners. The only things missing are, of course, the user base and popularity. That's left Heello, after a short period where it was an amusing haven for joke accounts (imagine Mark Zuckerberg as a profane megalomaniac), largely empty.

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Funded By Me vs. Kickstarter

"Crowdfunding has been used for centuries," says the About page for Funded By Me, almost coming across as an excuse to blunt any accusations of copyingKickstarter. It's actually a rather benign clone, basically taking the crowdfunding idea and giving it a base in Scandinavia. Site design is very similar, however, with both adopting a call to action that's more prominent than the brand, followed by a Pinterest-y river of featured projects.

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Yammer vs. Facebook

Yammer is a networking tool for business. Rather than re-invent the wheel on group communication, Yammer chose to emulate Facebook's user interface and functionality. And when we say "emulate" we mean "copy wholesale," right down to the blue-and-white color scheme, pulldown menus and sidebar list of apps. If you have both services open, you are guaranteed to be confused about which one you're on at some point -- probably right when you're about to share those photos of your pub crawl last night.

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SCVNGR vs. Foursquare

Location services have been around for a long time, and Foursquare is far from the first. It's arguably the most successful, though, and with that success brings imitators. Case in point: SCVNGR, whose name may be a little too on the nose, and cribs not just Foursquare's concept of socially powered check-ins, but also the game mechanics of badges as well. Facebook might also want to have a word about the main menu, since it looks very similar to the one in Facebook's old iOS app.

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DianDian vs. Tumblr

Can we forgive a service in China for wanting to create an instablogging service that functions just like Tumblr? Of course. Is it then OK to rip off the execution so completely that the sign-up process, layout and tiled explore wall. We'll leave that up to you, but there's no question DianDian, aka the Chinese Tumblr, is one of the more top-to-bottom copycats we've seen.

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Hacker News vs. Reddit

Take one look at Reddit and you'll wonder why anyone would ever want to rip off its design, but there's Hacker News, inviting the question. Reddit, like Craigslist, is almost laughably minimalistic, and it wears its stripped-down design with pride. The approach is popular with a certain nerdy demographic, and it's clearly the same group targeted by Hacker News, complete with its own voting system.

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PicPlz vs. Instagram

Sorry, PicPlz, we're not buying it. You may have changed Instagram's "Popular" to "Interesting" and taken the number of columns down to three from four, but it's the same damn thing. Just like "My Network" is exactly like "Feed" and "News" is "Activity." PicPlz may do a couple of tricks that Instagram doesn't, like preserving the original image, but the whole presentation makes it come across as a second-rate copy.

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Blinklist vs. Delicious

During its Yahoo years, you wouldn't have thought Delicious would have been worth ripping off, but being the original web-based bookmarks app counts for something (as does the clever name). Delicious has since revamped itself, so Blinklist serves as a ripoff of what it used to be, and kind of an ugly one at that. And you have to question the relevance of a "social bookmarking" service that none of my friends are on and where one of the Popular topics is just "insurance." As ripoffs go, this one's a fail.

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DZone vs. Digg

Sorry Dzone, but flipping which side your margin is on (as well as the thumbnail photos on posts) doesn't make your site design any less of a Digg ripoff. Maybe selecting a different color for your vote boxes or ditching the white background would do the trick. The "Digg for developers" concept is kind of promising, but right now there's not much reason to visit DZone instead of the developers section of Digg.

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In the world of social media, discovering that worthwhile original idea for your app or website is by far the hardest thing to get right. It’s so hard, in fact — and the field so potentially lucrative — that many parties who jump into the field tend not to bother. Why should you create something original when there are so many successful sites and services that you can just rip off?

At least that appears to be the thinking behind many Internet companies whose concepts, web design or apps appear to owe a lot to other, more successful forebears. Once you start looking, it’s not hard to find digital ripoffs. At best, they’re quirky homages inspired by a successful digital brand. At worst, they’re ersatz imitators looking to cash in on someone else’s idea — just a step or two above malware.

Perhaps that’s a little harsh. After all, the humor writer Josh Billings once said, “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” If you substitute “web designer” for “writer,” he may have been talking about the state of digital design today. After all, it would be impossible to find a design that isn’t at least a little derivative.

SEE ALSO: Top 5 Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Still, there’s a difference between borrowing some core design ideas and wholesale imitating. In social media, where the essential premise of connecting and sharing with your friends provides a basic architecture, perhaps the line between the two is blurrier than in other fields. After all, Facebook was called a MySpace clone, which was called a Friendster clone before that. But they are (and were) nothing like each other.

While building on existing concepts will always be part of design, so too will mimics, where the cloning is so pervasive and total that the site is nothing more than a copy of the original, merely slipped into a different skin. Here are the 10 most flagrant design ripoffs in social media today, at least to Mashable‘s eye.