Among the complaints: SuperGu is claiming ownership to ajax effects, sidebars, login boxes, “read more” links, navigation tabs, the expression “Powered by”, tags, the RSS icon and other common web design elements and layouts….

SuperGu is taking legal action against Pligg for stealing page elements, widgets….

You’re right, everyone’s focused on the RSS icon claim, but if you look at the C&D document, it’s more about the look-and-feel. (nobody reads anything these days)

I’ve been following Pligg and Supergu right from the beginning. The folks at Pligg kept trying to slam Supergu right from the start. They put one guy in charge of that task. Phelps did come up with some amazing ideas that only worried Pligg and people did start to jump ship. It’ so easy to take Pligg’s side, especially if you’re just tuning in and jumping into the anti-Supergu bandwagon.

Phelps big mistake was deleting those posts from Pligg. However, Pligg now has other things to worry about: Ning-ning-ning-ning! I want to see them badmouth Marc Andreesen.

Durr he stole my Javascript code! Lets sue… How it looks like.

function fade_what(this) {

setTimeout(”Effect.Fade(’this’)”,2000);

}

WOW! I guess you can sue… Because theres look’s like this!

function what_fade(this) {

setTimeout(”Effect.Fade(’this’)”,2000);

}

Someone better be worried huh

http://www.pligg.com/5023/

I think it’s time we kill off most of the vote-the-title sites, starting with Digg…

James is a real estate agent full time, I was impressed with what he has built. Talk to the man just a little bit, seemed like one paranoid dude. . . I noticed that he was not very (tech) business savy, I chalk this up to lack of knowledge than evilness. . .

james, wake up dude . . . open source supergu as you planned, contribute instead of getting all pissy about someone biting off your ideas. . .

(first time entreprenuers get way too caught up on “ideas” rather than execution)

Basically it shows a txt file that was available on the supergu site showing an internal doc to the designer/developer that was to create the clone. Also mentioning not to talk to Pligg or discuss in any forums.

Either this guy is pure evil or an a-hole. Im hoping he’s just an a-hole looking for some publicity. If this is link bait then job well done, if this was a serious business maneuver then I hope the wrath of the blogosphere will nit cut him any slack.

(Mike: I just read the transcript of you and Scrivs going back and forth about the redesign, wow)

AshDigg has done a lot of research and has been working on speeding Pligg up. It may have not been Template Lite at all (Pligg uses Template Lite, not Smarty). The slowness some people experience may have been caused by too many database calls. We’re currently working on it and Ash has decreased the database calls by almost 50% in the past week.

# nitsuj

March 19th, 2007 at 2:47 pm

classic, just classic.

btw michael, i’m suing you for the techcrunch name. i work in tech and like cap’n crunch, close enough.

If James is a decent guy and just wanted to make something better than Pligg, he could have just gone ahead and not acted like a complete walking turd. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to believe he’s anything but, because only a turd would be pursuing this.

And had he released something like Pligg sans Smarty, I would have used it too. Smarty absolutely blows in practice, and both softwares I’ve used that emplyed it (X-Cart and Pligg) are dog manure slow.

what makes me kinda sad is that james was originally trying to really contribute to pligg last year but the pligg guys were not buying into his ideas, most of which involved dropping the ’smary templating system’ (you’ll notice of course that most pligg sites operate very slowly as a result of the templating schema)…supergu’s demo, which was up for several months, was stunning visually and offered superior performance…

if james ever offers to package and sell what he’s put together, i’d actually pay money to license it for a site, it’s that solid…just because something is free doesn’t mean it stands on higher moral ground – nobody involved in this has offered anything beyond pissing fight insights…

pligg is obviously laughing about this, though of course paying real money to talk back through lawyers, all of which stands to slow things down for everybody and pull resources away from pligg development projects…in the interim, it’s put the release of supergu on the maybe-or-never release path…

i hope that they reach some kind of resolve, for the sake of all of their respective community members…