Beyond Binary

Microsoft said on Monday afternoon that it's investigating allegations that a recently launched microblogging site in China lifts the code and interface of a start-up's rival service.

"Microsoft takes intellectual property seriously, and we are currently investigating these allegations," company spokesman Mark Murray said in a statement. "It may take some time due to the time zone differences with Beijing."

Earlier on Monday, Canada's Plurk went public with charges that Microsoft's Juku service "rips off" the look and feel of its microblogging service and also appears to use more than 80 percent of the same code, all without permission.

"Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world," Plurk said on its blog.

Plurk said it is still evaluating what to do in the case.

"We're not entirely sure but we are exploring our options," Plurk said. We have been seeking advice from respected colleagues, responding to press inquiries and gathering facts on the timeline of events and parties involved here to understand why and how this took place.

It's the second time in recent weeks that Microsoft has been accused of lifting other's work in its products. Last month, the company was forced to pull down a tool for loading Windows 7 onto Netbooks after allegations that the product improperly included open-source code. Microsoft later apologized and last week re-released the tool under the GPL open-source license.

Update, 5:50 p.m. PT: A few more details are starting to trickle in.

According to a source familiar with the situation, the Juku application was created for MSN China, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and a Chinese company. However, the source says the application was not designed by Microsoft or the joint venture, but rather by a third-party Chinese vendor hired for the task.

If that sounds a bit familiar, Microsoft also blamed a vendor for the Windows 7 download tool that contained GPL code. Contracting with vendors is typical, and Microsoft typically requires that the third party provide legal guarantees that the code is free of any intellectual property infringement.

As of this point, the Juku program continues to run on the MSN China site.

Plurk accuses Microsoft China of ripping off its design and code to create its Juku microblogging service.

(Credit: Plurk)

A start-up says that a microblogging service recently launched by Microsoft in China "rips off" its user interface and also contains a huge percentage of similar code.

Plurk, which runs a microblogging service of its own, says more than 80 percent of the code for Microsoft's Juku service appears to be lifted from its service.

"Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world," Plurk said on its company blog.

A Microsoft representative in the U.S. said the company was looking into the matter. Microsoft launched the Twitter-like Juku service over the past couple of weeks in China, but told various media outlets, including PaidContent.org, that it had no current plans to introduce it in other markets.

Plurk said that as a young start-up, it was "shocked" and "stunned" and said the company isn't sure what to do next.

"So what next? We're not entirely sure but we are exploring our options," Plurk said on its blog, adding that the company was tipped off by bloggers and Taiwanese users of the Plurk service of the similarities between its service and Microsoft's Juku.

"Needless to say we were absolutely shocked and outraged when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering had with Plurk. From the filter tabs, emoticons, qualifier/verb placement, Karma scoring system, media support, new user walkthroughs to pretty much everything else that gives Plurk its trademark appeal, Microsoft China's offering ripped off our service."

On its blog, Plurk posted screenshots of both its service and the Juku site.

Plurk said that Microsoft China's recently launched microblogging site "rips off" both code and design from Plurk.

(Credit: Plurk)

Plurk also posted two examples of code similarities between its service and Microsoft's.

The similarities were so great, Plurk said, that many people thought Microsoft had struck a partnership with the startup.

"Let's clear the air around this," Plurk said. "While many reputable internet companies have forged solid partnerships with Plurk, valuing our innovation and market leadership in Asia, Microsoft was absolutely not one of them. We were never contacted by any party at (Microsoft) to collaborate on such a venture nor did we give any prior written or verbal permission to anyone on their side to take our code, take our CSS, and copy the essence and ethos of our service."

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

PASADENA, Calif.--Ashton Kutcher said that the fact he beat CNN to a million Twitter followers is a significant deal.

Kutcher, known to his nearly 3 million followers as "aplusk," said that it shows that one individual can have the power to reach as many people in a new medium as a media conglomerate.

"Individuals are becoming consumers and (the) editors of the media," Kutcher said. "It has and will forever change media."

While he doubts his content has the broad relevance of, say, CNN, Kutcher said having such a large audience is both fun and useful for his job as an actor.

"It gives you an ability to stay in tune with your audience...but also as it has continued to grow, it gives me a great platform to syndicate content."

Kutcher noted that half the budget of a film is spent on marketing, basically trying to reach the potential audience of that movie.

"I can do it for free (by) pushing a button," Kutcher said. "There's a value proposition with my other job."

Although he spoke of Twitter specifically, Kutcher said the real advance was widely distributed, real-time microblogging. He said that someone will probably come around with a microblogging service that syndicates better and searches better than Twitter.

For those who want more aplusk, here's a video interview that CNET News did last year with Kutcher on the launch of his entertainment Web site.

Twitter's Biz Stone (right) speaks with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky at Brainstorm: Tech on Thursday.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

PASADENA, Calif.--Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that, for all its success, the company is still 1 percent of where it wants to be. Oh, yeah and it still doesn't have a head of sales.

"We have a lot of growing still to do," Stone said Thursday at the Brainstorm: Tech conference here. The company has managed to grow its staff to 55 workers. (That's up from 43 in May.) Stone said the company is trying to keep focused on the longer term.

"We don't want to be that child actor...that grew up all freaky," he said. "We want to be like (child actor-turned-director) Ron Howard."

Stone said he understands the widespread concern that the company doesn't generate any significant revenue. He said the anger comes from the fact that people passionately want the company to succeed.

"It's like a nice loving mom that wants to make sure you are eating," he said.

Stone made his now-familiar argument that the company still needs to put its energy building the service.

"The level of awareness is still way bigger than the level of engagement," Stone said.

One thing the company is doing is launching a "Twitter 101" to explain to businesses how they might use the service. That should be up Thursday or Friday, Stone said.

Other new features are coming soon, Stone said.

Predictably, talk shifted to a widely publicized hack that led to loads of confidential documents being published on several Web sites, including TechCrunch.

Stone cautioned not to take leaked financial documents too seriously. The documents were more of a "thought exercise."

"If there's any takeaway from that it's that we are thinking big," Stone said. Stone said that he has spent time contacting the company's current and future partners to put the documents in context. "These were unpublished notes not meant for public consumption."

He declined to talk about whether Twitter might sue the hacker who got the documents, or TechCrunch, which published them.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't want to comment too much on any ongoing investigation type stuff."

One of the interesting comments came from Wal-Mart communications VP Mona Williams, who told Stone her company really needed better tools to filter all of the comments that come in mentioning Wal-Mart.

"That's something I think we'd be willing to pay for," she said.

For more on Twitter, check out this video interview I did with Stone and CEO Evan Williams at the D: All Things Digital conference in May.

Created by former Microsoft search head Ken Moss, CrowdEye gives several views of a topic based on the conversations taking place on Twitter.

(Credit: CNET)

The former head of Microsoft's search unit may have left Redmond, but he is still very much in the search game.

Ken Moss, who led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years, has spent the last months building CrowdEye, a real-time search engine that aims to allow users to better mine Twitter to get a pulse on hot topics.

The service, which is going into public beta on Thursday, offers up not only the latest tweets on a topic, but also a list of the most popular links on a topic and a tag cloud of associated terms.

Moss

(Credit: CrowdEye)

"I think that real-time search is the next big thing in search," Moss said in a telephone interview. "It's an area that has been underexploited to date."

Searching Twitter is good for news, he said, but also for things such as finding the latest viral video or a solution to a new software bug.

Of course, Moss is not alone in this thinking. Twitter has its own search engine, while others such as Topsy and OneRiot, are also mining the twitterverse.

Among its features, CrowdEye has a historical view that allows one to see how the discussion on a topic has evolved. Although, for now, that historical period is only three days.

"Right now that's all we support, but its definitely something I'd anticipate growing over time," Moss said.

Moss has been working on CrowdEye for about nine months. For now, his only other co-worker is his wife, Becca Moss, also a former 'softie.

"Right now it is still the two of us for now, but we hope to expand that soon," Moss said.

Moss said he looks forward to listening to feedback once the product goes public and already has a long to-do list of things he would like to add, things such as adding more real-time sources beyond twitter.

"I think there's a very long list of exciting improvements that will take us a long while," he said.

The plan to launch CrowdEye was noted earlier by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley and on Seattle-area news site TechFlash.

Mark Cuban, speaking Wednesday at the D: All Things Digital event in Carlsbad, Calif.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Mark Cuban says that despite the growth of YouTube, the Internet video market over the last decade has actually been a disappointment.

The problem, he said, is that when Google bought YouTube it focused on ubiquity rather than making money. The result, he said, is that the market can't really sustain itself.

"This is a company that is literally subsidizing the bandwidth for the world," Cuban said, speaking at the D: All Things Digital event. That's a risk, Cuban said, if someone were to ever find a better search business model than Google.

"I think its a real disappointment to see where Internet video has come," Cuban said, noting that the industry still doesn't have advertising standards, among other shortcomings.

Asked why that doesn't sound like a business opportunity, Cuban said, "It's like fighting Microsoft" in the PC business.

"YouTube has gotten so big you are not a standard unless YouTube adopts you."

He gave some credit to Hulu for trying to build a money-making Internet video site.

"Hulu has done some great things and they are focused on monetization," he said, but also added "they have some big pockets that they have to appease."

As he has in the past, Cuban criticized the Internet saying it was "dead," "staid," and generally uninteresting. He likened it to the PC software business after the WordPerfect-Word and other battles had ended.

"It's just a utility," he said.

As for the Twitter guys, he said he is not worried they don't have a business model.

"They can make money," Cuban said. "They are having just as much fun teasing everyone."

Twitter's Evan Williams and Biz Stone (far right) on stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the opening keynote Tuesday of D: All Things Digital.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

CARLSBAD, Calif.--I left the Twitter keynote still wondering what the company's business model will be, but also with a new question.

Why are the co-founders so seemingly uninterested in making money? Haven't they heard about striking while the iron is hot? (Clearly they have. After all, Evan Williams sold Blogger to Google.)

Anyway, after the speech I got a chance to ask them that and more firsthand.

"I wouldn't say we're not focused on the dollars," Williams told CNET News. "We are trying to take a really long-term perspective about how we build a valuable and large company. That takes time and we only have so many resources and there's so much we have to do...it's just a timing thing."

Stone echoed that.

"In order to create a company that has this enduring value, that is going to be here 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now, you have to focus on delivering value first and profit second, especially considering we are only two years old," Stone said. "We have time to work on what will be our business model."

For the full interview, check out the video embedded below.

Twitter's Evan Williams and Biz Stone (far right) on stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the opening keynote Tuesday of D: All Things Digital.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

CARLSBAD, Calif.--The D7: All Things Digital opening night keynote, often reserved for tech legends like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, was handed over this year to the team behind Twitter. CNET News is offering live coverage, so check back for frequent updates.

6:37 p.m. PT: Rupert Murdoch takes the stage to kick things off.

6:40 p.m. PT: Singer Jill Sobule takes the stage with a song written for Rupert. Kara Swisher comes out to hold the lyrics.

"Rupert I met you last year at this conference," she sang. "Do you remember me. They took our picture. you gave me a warm hug. It was really disconcerting. I've never been a big fan."

6:47 p.m. PT: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher take the stage.

They thank the audience. "We've decided to declare the end of Web 2.0 right here," Mossberg said, declaring the start of, you guessed it Web 3.0.

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher take the stage Tuesday at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)

"We're that creative," Swisher chimed in.

6:50 p.m. PT: Now they are musing about the econolyse and plugging their iPhone app.

Now they are mocking their presenting companies with iPhone apps that they could benefit from.

"Trying to make money from an overvalued microblogging service," they said. "We've got an app for that," they added, showing a picture of the Twitter fail whale being harpooned with dollar signs.

They went on to mock Microsoft's search engine, Yahoo's occasionally foul-mouthed CEO and MySpace.

6:58 p.m. PT: As a prelude to the Twitter execs, Swisher interviewed her mom.

Do you Twitter, Swisher asked her mom. Why would I want to that, the elder Swisher said.

"Why would I want people to know what I am doing?" she said. "It's nobody's business."

"It's going to be sold for a zillion dollars," Swisher said.

"Lucky them," Swisher's mom said.

7:10 p.m. PT: Back up after some networking problems. To make a a long story short, Swisher and Mossberg have been hammering them on how many people regularly use Twitter as well as about their past company, which specialized in podcasting and got "crushed" by Apple, according to Mossberg and Swisher.

As it has in years past, Microsoft is meeting this week with some of its hardcore enthusiasts--the Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) that serve in many ways as unpaid ambassadors for the company's products.

This year, though, the gathering with tech enthusiasts is completely closed to reporters and is also covered by nondisclosure agreements (NDA). However, that hasn't stopped the chatter, particularly because of the heavy use of Twitter to discuss the event. (For the latest discussion, simply click on this link.)

There are dozens of postings every few minutes, ranging from talk about meals and the weather to teases about what's being discussed and even some direct discussion of the content itself.

This post is an example of the tease variety from Twitter user JuanKaram. "Wooooooooooow!!!!!! Nda sorry... WOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!"

And there are some twitter postings that I'd rather not hear about, such as "MS Toilet: Up flush for #1 down flush for #2. Seems like a lot of thought. :-) needs automation #mvp09."

But there are also some interesting tidbits that I will be digging around for more dirt on.

Some of the postings are admonitions to other Twitterers to stop violating their NDAs. And still other posters simply want to get a better understanding of what they are and aren't allowed to talk about, given that some of the stuff being discussed is already public.

The end result is that what is made public is a collection of tidbits that's kind of like being at the event itself when you can't hear half of what was being said and can only see via a strobe light that flashed every few seconds.

For its part, Microsoft said it decided to make the MVP event off-the-record and not allow reporters "to enhance the opportunity for direct dialogue" with the MVPs. The company did post some information about the event on its Web site.

As for the NDA, Silverlight head Scott Guthrie had this to say about Microsoft's enforcement powers. "There's a little red light that we're going to ask you to look at as you leave." (And of course, that quote itself is courtesy of one Twitter poster.

Even if Microsoft did steal the mind-zapping wand from the Men in Black boys, it may be too late, thanks to the real-time powers of Twitter.

The MVP summit hasn't always been completely behind closed doors, notes TechFlash's Todd Bishop who attended last year's keynote by CEO Steve Ballmer. (Ballmer's speech this year--scheduled for Wednesday--is slated to be closed to reporters.)

I'll be keeping a close eye on the Twitter posts, but if someone sees something good I should follow up on, please let me know.