I’ve been playing around with 43 Things and its family of sites for some time now.
I was taking a browse through my Del.icio.us inbox today (does everyone else use this? Its fabulous and I’ve only recently happened upon it!), and noticed a link that Robert Scoble (who I stalk via Del.icio.us) posted called 8by1
Now, I love the sentiment of the site (and it reminds me a lot of a site I was working on before called Act Now), but holy hell it reminds me way too much of the 43 Things site.
I took a little look around to see if anyone from 43 Things was claiming the site, or being credited for the the site or anything like that… but I can’t see anything. I tried checking out the 8by1 blog but that wasn’t loading…
I hate to bitch about something that has seemingly noble objectives, but … hell, it looks like they’ve ripped off 43 Things?!
Does anyone know some more background on this? Are they related?
I’m going to email them and ask. Stay tuned.
Convergent evolution, perhaps? What’re the timelines on the two projects?
8by1 launched in January. 43 Things has been around for at least 12 months.
(to the point that its now branched out into 43 Places, and other variants on itself).
i’ve had a reply back from the guys at 8by1. They say:
A few people have pointed out there are some similarities between us and 43things, and currently with the light features on our alpha test version, we can understand this comparison. I can assure you, however, we are not building yet another “43things copycat
yeah, i don’t know. Still looks to me like they’ve made a pretty poor copy of 43 Things, to be honest.
Also – ‘alpha test version’. I didn’t notice this before but these guys have gone public even *before* they get to beta.
Please.