YAPOMR, or yet another Ping-O-Matic ripoff. I’m seeing at least one of these a week now. “1,004 pings served.” The road from a thousand to 268,879,563 (the current PoM count) is very rough, I wish them the best. Everyone is trying to get in this space now, but each is like an open proxy for ping spammers.
A ripoff in what sense?
Maybe it’s just me, I could be overly sensitive? It looks very, very similar to the Ping-O-Matic front page, and it performs exactly the same function.
The only significant similarity that it shares with Ping-O-Matic homepage is that rectangular menu ‘block’ – and that’s hardly a “ripoff”. Nor is performing the same function.
Granted, the ping form in itself is the same. But as far as offering the same function/service, it wasn’t coined by you so it’s open for anyone to replicate. =)
Matt, it is a ripoff of Ping-O-Matic, there is no doubt in my mind. Why do people assume that it doesnt look the same just becasue the ripoff site is centered and more narrow? I guess I am just as sensitive as Matt.
Lets examine it. Overall border is the same, looks like 3px to me. Navigation is nearly identical, and on mouseover the boxes enlarge by 1px on the top. The form for inputing your blog name and details is identical, save the rounded corners on the fieldset.
The overall layour is identical, showing the Blog Details, then Services to Ping. The only slight difference is the fact that Ping-O-Matic does not include the other “Flux” services, In their case it would be “Other Ping-O-Matic services”.
Seriously, its a ripoff. And Ping-O-Matic’s looks better anyway. Flux is too cluttered. I do like the large text input boxes though, those are becoming more and more popular because of basecamp and apps like that.
Beyond just the numerous similarities in the markup, there’s things like it says “(not RSS URL)” in parentheses by the URL box. We added that after receiving hundreds of questions about what to put in there. Look at their FAQ, what is a ping and why should I bother? It says basically the same thing as the Ping-O-Matic about page.
Well, it’s not like we’ve got a patent on the idea, so anybody is free to come up with a competing service. But they’ve got a long row to hoe before they capture any significant portion of the market. We’ve got a Google PageRank of 7.
But yes, their design and text is annoyingly similar to ours.
I say its all a scam, everyone is taking your pings and feeding them tospammers :p
j/k. But matt, though it seems there site is a ripoff to yours, you also realize, very few will ever come close to your power because by default ping-o-matic is selected by wordpress š
It’s amazing how often a good page’s underlying architecture takes much, much more work than what most people think of as the design — things like colours, fonts and lines. It’s the underlying architecture that’s being copied here.
Sincerest form of flattery I guess, Matt. Maybe ping-o-matic could offer a little tag that says “.gifs and HTML by us. Remaining intellectual effort by Dougal Campbell and Matthew Mullenweg.”
Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or so they say. Besides, I don’t see how new services would be entrenching on market share. If nothing else, the recent Gravatar outage proved it helps to have more than one option for a Web service.
Maybe I’m naive, but even if they copied you (which I think they did), what would be so bad about it?
It’s not like you’re making lots of $$$ with it or am I mistaken?
Sure it’s annoying because they don’t seem to honour/value/appreciate your work, but it’s nothing to loose your head about, either…
Because it’s just going to be another avenue for spammers to abuse the ping stream. It’s quite a bit of work to keep up with, if they wanted to just offer a branded version of Ping-O-Matic we’d gladly help them, like you said we’re not making any money from it.
Not discounting the question of copying but looking at the site and specifically the FAQ the ping service seems to be one part of a more integrated, ambitious whole. BlogFlux may or may not succeed but I do like that they’re trying to bring something together in a different way.
Matt: I don’t support anyone ripping you off, if that’s what happened here. But with that said, I *hope* lots of alternative pingers start to develop. P-o-M is already showing the strain of its success, so other folks with other servers are welcome to the table as far as I’m concerned.
We actually have good news about that tonight. š
The about page reveals more about blogflux. They say they took over the eatonweb portal, and if you look at the whois records you would say it is a long-established blog directory with no malicious motives, and looking at archive.org for the eatonweb site it always was a blog and a portal until recently.
The parent company for blogflux is enthorpia, and when you start looking into them things get interesting. They run a bunch of other sites, which all seem to be a ripoff of sitepoint – eg. webmasterstop.com and other article/code sites. What is interesting about these other sites they run is the footnote – “Permission has been obtained for all printed articles”, if you Google search you will see that most of the articles here are re-prints, so this actually isn’t a source of articles or news at all. This theme continues with one of their other sites webscriptsdirectory. If you click on ‘PHP’, look at the categories then compare it to this site: allthescripts.com, categories look farmiliar? Do a Google search with these categories in a list, and you see that the same site and the same scripts have been copied numerous times. Go through their ‘network’ of sites and you see much the same theme but with different topics, the common denominator being the large presence of ads and affiliate links on each site, and the fact that the content has been copied. My end opinion is that these guys are spammers, on a very large scale, trying to drive hits to their network of sites for affiliate and ad revenue. They promote their own software evoArticles that makes it easy for users to publish articles etc. I say they are using this along with copy+paste to help create a large number of sites as Google fodder. My theory is is that these guys purchased eatonweb to extend into the blogging world, and launching blogflux and the ping tool ontop of this furthers their reach into the blogging world (From code sites, webmaster articles, hosting reviews etc.)
Matt I say the best ways to get these guys, that is if you believe what I have found with them being frequent copyright infringers, would be to report it to Google, they might be better equiped to work out how large the network of sites is and how they are using it to game pagerank and to grab ad revenue. After clicking through around 40 of their sites and looking up the content they use, I am very convinced that you have stumbled on a spam farm – these guys have no interest in developing anything useful for anybody else.
re: “We actually have good news about that tonight. :)”
so share it please!! I’d love to offer a co-branded P-o-M to my customers.
Whoa, great work Nik.
It is shocking to see every single P-o-M feature copied, but I suppose the worse you could do is become bitter. Try to see the flattery, as if you are the Google of pings… http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/03/0016223&tid=109&tid=189&tid=1
Ping-o-matic was the first thing I thought of when I saw it, and that was two days before Matt posted about it.
Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.
What I don’t understand is why anyone would use this service; it offers fewer sites to ping than PoM and the page is more cluttered. The only “good” thing they have is a link to select all the boxes, which is something I wish PoM had (although most of the time it doesn’t bother me as the cookie I have picks the ones I used last time anyway). I’ve no objections to people running competing services, but it does seem like a bit of a waste of time in this case as they’re not offering anything new.
Woah woah. Hold on a minute. It’s easy to bash someone without getting input from the other end.
1. Is our design similar to pingomatic? You can say that, but really, what is there to copy? Its an input box of sitename + site URL + checkboxes. I added the mention of not an RSS feed because we used to have weblogalot, and a person testing it out mentioned the following:
‘1. Weblogalot complained:
Cannot find your URL in a database! Please see
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping/ for details.
I went to the site and found they want the RSS feed, not the blog URL.
For Blogspot blogs, that means appending atom.xml to the URL, like
this:’
So we ended up removing weblogalot, and mentioned that people should only enter their URL, and not their RSS. This was also done because as people used it, we noticed a lot of people putting in their RSS feed, not their URL. Heck, I had people asking me what RSS was and I wrote a page on that too.
The rounded edges have been a part of our approach for a long time. If you checked out evoTopsites (as an example), you can see the rounded edges. Frankly I am new to blogging, and I can 100% say that we had ’rounded edges’ in our software before I ever came across PingOMatic. To be even more honest, I first came across pinging at http://www.pingmyblog.com, which is owned by a friend of mine. The actual implementation of the BF Pinger is AJAX oriented, loading each ping request separately. So frankly, the accusations of copying PingOMatic are slightly off – POM has a simple approach, and so do we.
In regards to Enthropia Inc being a spam network, that is ridiculous. WebmasterStop has been around since 2001. If you look at Mike’s articles, each one is original. We used to publish reprints that authors submitted (we never went around asking for any articles). At a minimum, the last six months have all been 100% original articles.
Webscriptsdirectory.com is not ours. Please note the footer. Next time make sure you research on that is upto par also. All the rest of our content is 100% original, and baseless accusations of us as spammers is insulting and actually, hurtful.
BillSaysThis summed up our efforts – there are a lot of disjointed blog services that people are using, and we want to bring them all into one simple place.
Lastly, Brigette, the former owner of EatonWeb, is *very* happy with what we are doing. I talk to her daily about improvements and suggestions on what to work with.
Note: Please excuse any mis-spellings and grammar errors š
Oooooh, they got the rel=”nofollow” from Matt.
Some comments on the comments.
I thought I’d chime in a little. I’ve worked with Ahmed several times in the past and am currently working with him. Nik, to accuse him of some of the stuff you have is just flat out wrong. Saying he creates sites for Google fodder is just flat out wrong, his sites are a far cry from a spam farm. Just because content appears on more than one page on the web doesn’t mean anything. Authors of content allow their work to be published in more than one place all the time.
I own http://www.pingmyblog.com and created it as a simple project about a year or so ago to familiarize myself with XML-RPC. It’s extremely buggy and I actually need to fix it up. Anyway, so what if there are multiple sites of the same functionality. Last time I checked, the web is full of them. I don’t think myself of Ahmed have any illusions of competing with POM. I just wanted a good tool for my users to use as I’m sure he did.
Anyway, none of this is that big of a deal, I just don’t like unnecessary bashing š
Why can’t we all just get along š
For the record, I made the button maker and saying we’re just “ripping off” other sites, hurts.
That took a lot of time and frustration (a WHOLE lot of frustration debugging it), and when someone goes around saying that all we’re doing is copying someone else, that work goes to waste.
BlogFLux? Those Swiss guys? I didn’t think they’d stoop this low…
Ahmed good to hear a response from you, I was going to email you today to follow up on some of the items from yesterday. If you read Matt’s original post, you will see that he is pointing out that this is yet another copy-cat service, and that one of these pops up each week. The original post didn’t have much to do with the interface, but rather the service itself being a copy of what PoM does. I dont see how you guys can make anything of such a service, the original intention of PoM (correct me if I am wrong) was so that instead of WordPress blogs having to be configured to ping multiple sources, they would all be setup by default to ping PoM and in-turn PoM would take care of the rest (since services come and go etc.). I dont see how a service such as this can survive outside of having backing from popular publishing software, but that is your prerogative and an issue for you to deal with. Sitting on our side of the fence, that is how we look at it, what could your motivation be to setup such a ping service.
I stand-by my comments in regards to these sites being Google fodder, there is absolutely no need to have 100 sites with 100 copies of the same content, there would only be one motivation to do that. Note that this is the *exact same* content on these sites, with the exact same scripts, its not just a matter of quoting something. What purpose could this *possibly* serve, seriously. You link to these sites, you protect their motives, that I dont understand, it leads me to believe you are defending a personal interest. All the links and sites that I looked at originated from your site, I didn’t stumble upon any other site and then wrongly associate it with yours, I dont know if you setup these other sites yourself, or if you are selling links to them, I dont expect you to admit to anything. My opinion is that polluting the web the way that these are serves nobody except the person or people who created those sites, same for the people promoting this crap by linking to it.
Nick, as I said, BlogFlux has bigger plans than just having individual sections on its own. Plus, you said that POM was made for WordPress – who says we are not making blogging software? š
In regards to google fodder, I still have no clue what you are talking about. Not one site of ours has identical content as another. Your example was webscriptsdirectory.com, which we do not even own! Your other example was webmasterstop.com, which as I said, is 80% original content (all of this – http://www.webmasterstop.com/author_1.html)! You are welcome to contact us, but like I said, accusing us of being google spammers is wrong (even our level of SEO is white-hat squeeky clean).
Also the Button Maker on that webpage is ripped !
I ought to be more clear on that Button Maker comment, the exact same feature is also available at http://kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/ – which is also called Button Maker. Who’s ripping off from who is hard to tell š
They were therebefore – but ours is different in usage than theres (we do alignment options instead of pixel, and ours offers more features).
i guess it won’t be long until we have a pingomaticomatic.com to ping all of these pingomatic-ish sites. it’s pingomatics all the way down!
Ha!
I was recently considering starting one of these services with my new website – weblogs.bz .
It looks like it would be difficult to create, and maintain. So, i think i’m gonna stay out it.
Aha! People, I made pingoat.com š It seems I’m a bit late here.
First of all, let me tell you something. I have no idea why you called Pingoat.com a “rip-off”. Is Gmail a rip-off of hotmail ? And I see you people posting similiarities like the border’s and “3px padding”. For God’s sake, if that bothers you, I am changing that!
Honestly, the “(not rss url)” WAS NOT COPIED FROM PINOMATIC. See, I run a ping server ( a recently updated list ) at boastology.com/ping. A lot of users ping manually with their RSS urls. So definitely I had to put on that message.
And again, I didnt start Pingoat.com to compete, or conquer your user base. All I wanted was a “better” service. And I wrote every inch of Pingoat.com from scratch. I really pity you on calling my creating a rip-off. If my service is any better than yours (i dont claim it), people naturally start using it.
And Matt, I have always admired you, honestly. But this post does make me feel a bit sorry for that.
Thank you.
Regards,
Kailash Nadh
Pingoat.com
Oops, forgot to say something. I’ve got atleast 25 mails pointing to this post š
I got linked to this site from WHT (http://webhostingtalk.com); and frankly I don’t know why you guys are up in arms about this. Sure, the sites do the same thing, and sure they look fairly similar to each other. But in all reality, both sites are really plain, there isn’t really that much to copy. I think you need to take a step back and realize that there is some competition rather then trashing people with a common goal on a popular blog. Saying they ask not to submit rss feeds as ripping and the fact that the layout looks roughly the same is just unresourceful.
http://www.google.com/
http://search.yahoo.com/?fr=FP-tab-web-t
http://www.altavista.com/
Don’t all those sites look similar? But do you see Google up in arms about it? There isn’t much to copy anyways, and no real way to expand on the service.
Kailash, I never said anything about Pingoat, nor did anyone else in this thread.
“. . . each is like an open proxy for ping spammers”
In what way is it more vulnerable to spammers than pingomatic?
Kailash that is pretty darn funny!