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. If you'd like to see more sample applications written on Google App Engine please check out our documentation and our App Gallery.
Thanks, The Google App Engine Team
Seems they did not want to deal with the criticism over the similiarities between it and campfire (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/huddlechat_campfire_rip.php)
This was really blown out of proportion. If anyone wants to perpetuate conspiracy theories you've got plenty of ammo with AppEngine. This HubbleChat thing is/was nothing. Cope.
This was just a demo app for a framework in a completely different language. I don't think it was a huge threat, I mean come on, they didn't invent online chatrooms. They just invented a doll house, my Mom can play with, that looks like a watered down IRC (for $$$).
The main reason they sell Campfire is for the integration with their other apps... something I doubt the Google App Engine Team managed to add to their clone.
They are really very humble about competition, in general.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/575-but-theres-only-so-ma...
Although I'd still come back and say there's only so many ways to do chat . . .
Maybe.
If you look at the amount of press proclaiming you can "re-create" a 37sigs app using googles new toolkit. Then you might say it's a clever "social media hack" to make the dev community to take notice. There is an alternative to ROR and it scales. And we told you by example. We got our point across using code not blogs!
It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon--" -PG
It's up to 37Signals to find the new features; it is not up to competitors to stop competing.
At this point it might be just as effective of a tech demo to release the source to huddlechat, although the chances of it happening are quite low.
There are 2 sets of hackers: those whose intellectual property has been stolen and those whose intellectual property will be stolen.
The former group thinks it's a big deal. The latter group doesn't (yet).
1.chat in a web browser
2.web pages with a 2 column design.
Neither of which are unique or patentable ideas. Seems like 37signals just exploited this for publicity. Unless there was some innovation here that I'm missing.
story at 11.
Infact, I even have my own, very special Campfire-inspired design, which is over at http://www.basementcoder.com/ravings/12
But then, maybe people might say mean things about ME too. :(
Don't get me wrong, I do think Google has a right to release competing products and they have done so with Gmail and many other apps. However, it's a very crappy message to send would-be developers to "trust" them to do the right thing. Let's not lose perspective just because you may or may not like the 37 Signals guys, it was a pretty crappy message to chance sending.
A browser-based chat client is a hardly spectacularly original idea, and 37signal's Campfire itself owes much to IRC, a protocol invented some 20 years ago and pretty much every IRC client has an extremely similar "look and feel" to Campfire anyway. I'm also very surprised no-one has created a free alternative to Campfire before - it seems like a painfully obvious thing to create and quite a small project.
And if it came from MS, I doubt anyone would have cared either - certainly no more than Google. Did anyone bitch when Microsoft largely recreated Java with .NET? Did anyone really care when Microsoft brought out Live.com strongly inspired by Google? Did anyone care when they brought out MSN Messenger, inspired by AIM and ICQ? What about taking on Flash (a JavaScript-based in-browser environment) with Silverlight (a JavaScript-based in-browser environment)? All those things are much more shameless than a JavaScript chat client.
When Microsoft created .net both pro and anti-Microsoft supported complained rather largely to answer your question. This was during the aspx days that eventually was scrapped in order to support common languages across their platforms.
You seemed to have missed my point though, this isn't Google or Microsoft creating a competitive product and going to market with it. It's Google asking developers and startups to trust them with both your code and data but they'll do the right thing with it. I wouldn't have trusted Microsoft back in the 90's before they were depicted as the borg on Slashdot and I don't trust Google now based on their decision to copy an application from the same market they are trying to encourage to use Google App Engine. This isn't Microsoft vs. Google or Adobe but it was in bad taste and they obvious agreed since they took down the app.
