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Digg is the new Apple
Digg users are increasingly turning into a vigilante mob that will jump to the site's defense at it sees fit.
A recent example is found in a Digg submission that blasts Yahoo for "shamelessly" ripping of Digg and bragging about it. The rant referred Yahoo's suggestion board, that allows users to submit suggestions for site enhancements and lets other users vote on it. Yahoo readily admits that the service offers "Digg-style voting".
The most famous outbreak of Digg user fury targeted AOL when the company redesigned its Netscape.com portal as a Digg.com copycat for general news (Digg at the time offered mostly technology links).
But why do Digg users claim that they have a moral ownership of Ajax powered voting boxes, rounded corners or social bookmarking? Digg didn't invent any of those features, it just happened to create the most user friendly implementation. Calling something a Digg ripoff is a stretch of the imagination.
The Digg vigilantes are starting to resemble the Mac fan boys. Apple users proudly proclaim that Windows Vista is copying design features from OS X, but they conveniently fail to notice that Apple didn't invent items like Dashboard (sidebar in Vista) or desktop search technology either.
In both cases, the loyalty seems to stem from the underdog effect. Apple nearly got crushed by the PC, Microsoft and its own management. Digg currently is the only major social bookmarking websites that remained independent – Wired.com owner CondeNet acquired Reddit and Yahoo has snapped up Del.icio.us. Digg is the only one that has a moral claim on being community driven, not money driven.
But an army of overly vocal backers doesn't mean that you are right.
Oh no, a site that allows users to indicate that they like a story or idea. How dare they!
Spanish
It seems like it is all about "Eye Candy" these days, functionality is secondary. If you app doesn't look good, people won't use it.
Posted by: Dan | February 24, 2007 4:52 AM
Looks like Bill Gates has a serious case of your underdog syndrome. He recently couldn't defend the $6 billion dollar copy job of Apple's Tiger OS. How could it cost that much to simply copy right down to the pixel level Apple's products? They must have shit poor coders at Microsoft.
Gates felt so strongly he decided to spew out a series of lies about Apple that just made him look stupid and reenforced his reputation as a liar and a thief. It was hilarious. You couldn't ask for better Apple advertising that a Balmer or Gates rave about how Apple wasn't being fair to them.
Posted by: Clue Giver | February 24, 2007 11:38 PM
Seems like this article was written for the sole purpose of taking a jab at Apple users. The MS/Apple argument is old and tired and rather boring. Maybe in the days of OS 9, we could take swipes at Windows, but now with OS X being UNIX, I don't think we need to cry about simple interfaces. Desktop searching was in OS 9 as Sherlock and probably came from a shareware author. Dashboard widgets are Kaleidoscope (Konfabulator), and Apple may not have invented them (thanks Arlo Rose), but they were running in OS 9 way before windows had cool stuff like that.
I used to see some merit in defending the Apple OS. No viruses, and better yet, no loss of CPU cycles fighting them, but my new 24 inch iMac boots into OS X, Windows Vista and Linux. The platform wars seem to be over. Can you dig it?
Posted by: mrbach | February 25, 2007 6:22 AM
Yawn
what as waste of coluimn inches
Posted by: Trotskiii | February 25, 2007 11:07 AM
Konfabulator came into being to replace the "Desktop Accessories" that existed on the Mac since 1984, but fell out of favor in later versions.
Apple did, however, copy the use of the word "Widgets" from the software that copied it's defunct Desktop Accessories.
If you copy the person copying you... is that copying?
Posted by: Tedious | February 25, 2007 9:12 PM