Plurk is copied by Microsoft, line by line.

It was first read on the plurk official blog, then on techcrunch, and then Washinton post, Microsoft is copying Plurk frontend code, nearly line-by-line.

While this evidently emotionally compromised plurk fans / plurkers, I step backword and think.

Copying javascript code this way is not something new, one Taiwan-based company copied facebook.com about 2 years ago.

Since what makes Web today is based on its public nature, it seems impossible to completely prevent people from copyng your javascript / HTML code without tools like jsmin, packer, yuicompressor, and google closure compiler, which can only increase the difficulties, but not eliminate the possibilities.

Clone the same function of micro-blogging is neither something new. It is actually something people has been doing these years. Neither it is possible to prevent people from doing so. People have been re-inventing wheels and cars since the day Tim Oreilly declared Web 2.0. It is e

Being the giant of IT, Microsoft has been doing so much leading researches in many domains of software development, including Desktop app and Web app. They decided to do their own micro-blogging service, that certainly means something. However, I personally would have expect something more original from this decision. Being a copy cat might be OK, but not something Microsoft should be doing.

You let people down, big man, seriously.

Plurk, on the other hand, has been doing great increasing the volume of members in Asia, specifically Taiwan, this year (2009). The official Plurk API came out just this month. It is expected to see some nice apps coming out soon.

This is probably the biggest thing this year. We shall sit back and watch to see how this event evolves.