Standing in the way of control!

Pictures from Berlin where Barack Obama gave a speech to an estimated crowd of 200000 people.

The Huffington Post:

Before the largest crowd of his campaign, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Thursday summoned Europeans and Americans together to “defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it” as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.

Now, firstly, I understand why there is such overexposure by the US media on Barrack Obama. No one sees a future if the US is to be ruled by the conservatives. The question I ask is: What are ordinary Americans thinking of this whole Europe visit by Obama? Do they feel left out? Does it not anger them? And as the Huffington post correctly points out: “

” …Before the largest crowd of his campaign…”

Should that crowd not consist of Americans? Will we see such support for him in the US? We must never forget that Obama faces many obstacles in his own country where many are not eager to see him become president.

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What the hell? Did Facebook steal Multiply’s look?

Last week, Facebook filed a lawsuit against German social network studiVZ, claiming that the site copied its “look, feel, features, and services.” Today, Multiply is alleging that Facebook did much of the same in launching its new re-design, and illustrating what they believe is a pattern of Facebook copying their site’s ideas.

Here’s a look at how one’s profile looks on the new Facebook and how it looks on Multiply:

While no lawsuit has been filed by Multiply, the company is certainly coming out swinging. In addition to the similarities in profile design, Multiply makes the following claims:

* Multiply launched its proprietary newsfeed in August of 2004, when the site launched. Two years later, Facebook introduced a similar, yet more basic, news feed for its users.

* Blogging, one of Multiply’s core features since launch, was introduced to Facebook more than 20 months later.

* Video sharing, a Multiply feature since June 2005, was introduced on Facebook nearly 16 months later.

* In September 2004, Multiply introduced photo printing services for its users, something that Facebook implemented two years later.

* In its most recent enhancement, “New Facebook” features several changes – both aesthetically and functionally – that make Facebook look and feel even more like Multiply.

While Multiply obviously feels like Facebook is copying them, they also take the opportunity to list reasons why they believe their product is superior, illustrated in the chart below:

So is Facebook ripping off Multiply, or is this simply a case of sour grapes? While Multiply has been growing steadily (traffic recently doubled to around 600 million monthly page views), it’s only a fraction of the size of Facebook. It’s also fairly common to see innovation imitated elsewhere on the Web – MySpace’s latest re-design added a lot of Facebook-like features including status updates and a news feed – so Multiply might not really have a foot to stand on, other than being able to say “we were first!” Let us know what you think in the comments.

From: Mashable!

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