HuddleChat Has Been Taken Down

A visit to http://www.huddlechat.com/ grants the following message:

Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We've heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we've decided to take it down. If you'd like to see more sample applications written on Google App Engine please check out our documentation and our App Gallery.

Thanks, The Google App Engine Team

Seems they did not want to deal with the criticism over the similiarities between it and campfire (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/huddlechat_campfire_rip.php)

37signals are such stuck up, elitist, preppy twats... They should eat their own words and compete.

http://tinyurl.com/65my4q

This was just a demo app for a framework in a completely different language. I don't think it was a huge threat, I mean come on, they didn't invent online chatrooms. They just invented a doll house, my Mom can play with, that looks like a watered down IRC (for $$$).

The main reason they sell Campfire is for the integration with their other apps... something I doubt the Google App Engine Team managed to add to their clone.

Here's the complaining and their basically solid rationalization for it.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/575-but-theres-only-so-ma...

Although I'd still come back and say there's only so many ways to do chat . . .

That's not complaining about competition, that's complaining about theft of design.

I really don't think they care if someone copies the functionality of one of their products, but I think they care when someone copies their words and design (CSS and images, in this case). Two completely different things.

It's funny how I don't hear anyone saying, wow how cool, they listened and tried their best to respect 37signals. All this was was a few engineers trying to make something cool really quick just to show what you can do with AppEngine. Google, probably thought it was cool too and decided to showcase it.

This was really blown out of proportion. If anyone wants to perpetuate conspiracy theories you've got plenty of ammo with AppEngine. This HubbleChat thing is/was nothing. Cope.