Reform Revolution, a Pinterest clone?
Yesterday morning, whilst drinking my morning coffee, a friend of mine sent me the following tweet. This post is about what I read. I want all of you to enjoy really shitty journalism and research at one of the most respected tech news blogs around, Mashable.
Have you seen this? mashable.com/2012/03/06/fri… Someone clearly hasn't done their homework;) — @septmbrindstry
Mashable’s editor Sarah Kessler and Brian Anthony Hernandez are accusing one of my projects Reform Revolution for being a Pinterest rip off (or clone (!?) even).
Funny thing is that Reform Revolution, a blog focusing on design and curated by 20+ people, has been online since 2007. The last design update was made in 2008.
Reform Revolution currently uses my own Wordpress, "Grid-A-Licious". I originally created this theme for Reform Revolution and had no plans to let it go public, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy it (and also started creating their own jQuery plugins and Wordpress themes very, very similar to mine), so I decided to give it away for free (for personal use only). Here is what I posted on December 19, 2008:
A christmas present from us at Suprb
Grid-A-Licious™ is a Wordpress Theme made by Suprb. Divs are placed in chronological order with a special grid. Grid-A-Licious uses the jQuery javascript framework which can be downloaded from www.jquery.com. This layout can be seen at sites such as Reform & Revolution (www.reformrevolution.com) and TypeNeu (www.typeneu.com). It seems like there are plenty of people that really like the layout and made their own. We decided to release this into the wild, so we created a theme, based on the same design you’ve seen before — for Wordpress."
Speaking of grid layouts and Pinterest. Did I tell you I created an image (or media) bookmarking service in February 2009? The name of the service was "Dropular". Oh, and have a look at the design and grid, seen this before?
Basically, Dropular was based on the same idea as Pinterest. Bookmark and collect your favorite images. Tag them and share with your friends and followers. Funny huh? Someone made a review of Dropular on Youtube:
Unfortunately, Dropular is no more. I decided to let it go and is currently trying to focus on something new rather than competing with other image bookmarking services.
I’m a really big fan of Pinterest and love the product. Don’t take me wrong. This post is only pointed to Sarah Kessler and Brian Anthony Hernandez at Mashable for not doing their homework and instead lying to the world.
Last and not least, I would like to credit Space Collective on being one of the first to bring this kind of grid layout to our attention.
Also would like to give a shout out to David DeSandro for creating the extraordinary jQuery Masonry plugin back in 2009 (?)
Please share this with everyone you think should read this.
Update
I’ve sent this tweet to Sarah, but she has ignored it.
Update 2
Check the Mashable comments above. Sarah claims that Pinterest launched in November 2009. Fine. But, check the link she posted. http://web.ar……20081205….com/. She actually posts a link that is one year wrong and still says that Reform Revolution is a rip off?
If she just checked any of the other web archived links here, hum… let’s say… this that was archived in 20090103, it would not have been so embarrassing. Darn.
To her, Pinterest launched in November 2009. So, the above link clearly says that Reform Revolution was 11 (or more even if you check the web archive links) months before the big launch of Pinterest.
Update 3
Still not a word from Sarah or Brian (or anyone at Mashable) about this. But, happy to read that there are people discussion the subject:
Also, I got interviewed by "Rapport", a news programme from the Swedish television broadcaster "Sveriges Television (SVT)" Svt.se.
Update 4
Here is a screenshot of the thread What websites look somewhat similar to Pinterest's design? that is going on at Qoura. Justin Edmund, product designer at Pinterest says "Reform Revolution has been around for a very long time (I subscribed to their RSS in 2008 or 2009 probably) and I don’t think that qualifies as a clone."
So, apparently Pinterest agrees with me.
Update 5
Finally heard back from Sarah. She apologizes for the mistake and adds "UPDATE: The site Reform and Revolution was posted online before Pinterest. Mashable regrets this error." to the Mashable article.
Thank you.
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