“Dear Zuck”. What the Fuck!
UPDATE: 4/11 at 7pm Pacific. Part 2 here — https://medium.com/@kteare/zuck-what-the-fuck-rebuttal-a-follow-up-19c915e89081#.1kapm3fp4
Note: If you read this and empathize, please Tweet, Facebook and generally share this today if possible.
I hope you don’t mind me calling you Zuck. We barely know each other, although I did once bump into you whilst walking in College Terrace in Palo Alto.
The thing is, Mark feels too familiar, and Mr Zuckerberg way too formal. Besides I am a veteran entrepreneur and you are way younger than me so Mr feels, you know, a bit much.
Zuck feels just about right, and the good thing is it rhymes with fuck! — which is really pertinent given what I am about to say.
Well, Zuck, it seems as if your Messenger team has been closely watching what I have been doing with chat.center. I mean, wow! watching isn’t even the word for it. Snooping, Spying, is more like it. And clearly they must have liked what they saw because they made a copy. It’s a big surprise because nobody there even told us how much it appealed to them.
In case you think me paranoid….here is a screenshot from the new web version of Messenger at http://m.me. It’s from my personal page.
And here is the screen shot from my chat.center page.
Now, Zuck, a fair person might say that it’s easy for two pages to look similar, especially if their goal is similar. the color schemes may just accidentally be the same. The 3 column layout also. And perhaps the message box at the bottom is just, you know, “obvious”. And I am a fair man, so I’ll give you that. But then it just gets plain spooky.
Here is a blurb from the chat.center web site.
Unique Chat URL — and Click-to-Chat button for everything else
So you can engage your customers everywhere, not just on your website.
Use your chat address on social profiles, social ad campaigns, direct mail, business cards, signage, restaurant menu, product packaging, brochures etc.
At our core we provide a unique URL that points to a person or a business. Mine is http://chat.center/keith.
And here is what you say at the Facebook page for Messenger:
Usernames help people find businesses on both Facebook and Messenger, so they can connect with and message the businesses they’re interested in more easily. Because each username is unique, they also help people to identify your exact business, even if you have a relatively common name.
Mine is http://m.me/kteare
Firstly, I want to thank your team for their embracing of our core concept. Of course they can’t go as far as us. We have integrated our offering into the DNS (the domain name system), so anybody can create a unique chat ID using their domain name. My incubator, archimedes labs, has done this and so you can reach me at http://chat.archimedeslabs.com. Being FaceBook the team want to keep things in-house and so their offering is inevitably more limited. But that said, it’s close to an exact copy — even down to the idea.
But it doesn’t stop there,
Today we’re also introducing Messenger Links, which businesses can use to make it fast and easy for people to start a message thread with them. Messenger Links use a Page’s username to create a short and memorable link (m.me/username) that, when clicked, opens a conversation with the business in Messenger.
On our chat.center web page we show our business customers this exact functionality.
This is close to an exact idea copy… but again there is a difference. My Facebook Unique chat ID cannot be clicked on by a non-Facebook member. if a user clicks it they are asked to log in with their FaceBook ID — like this:
chat.center on the other hand allows anybody (or if this is a business, any customer) to click a chat link and be in a chat with a business owner or ID owner. Try it. Click here — http://chat.center/cc — and you will see this:
No request to log in at all. A truly open chat ID available to a customer no matter what their membership status. Of course we do ask for a name and email address on a first chat, but that is to enable communication in case the chat receiver cannot reply right away. And it is not a registration. It is simply temporary for that chat.
So apart from the non-support for the DNS (domain name system), and so a user’s own internet identities; and apart from the requirement to log in to FaceBook, both of which limit your offering, it feels like a total rip-off of our idea.
Don’t get me wrong, we are flattered. And I am a big fan of your fearless acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which made Facebook relevant to the mobile era. We are not really concerned at a competitive level either. Open chat IDs are in many ways more attractive than Facebook ones for any self-respecting brand, and the DNS is clearly the right place to integrate this functionality. Besides, the version you copied dates back to April 2015. We are close to our next version and it is a significant step forward in this space. So this is not about the competition.
But, it would have been nice to chat ahead of time. We are a small team of 6, and I’m in Palo Alto and after all I’m only a click away at http://chat.center/keith. Really Zuck. What the Fuck!
BTW if you read this and want your own chat ID head over to http://chat.center. Use the code “12MonthsFree” and start enjoying “Click to Chat” for yourself or your business.
