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Ask HN: Our app UI looks exactly like the new Facebook news feed, now what?

4 points by eduardordm ↗ HN
My company is building a product launching in December. I just saw the new facebook news feed and the general UI design looks exactly like our app.

Of course they didn't copy us, but we did not copy them either. We started this project last year, our github repo has all the files and project development.

How can I protect my right to use this UI style? I'm not interested in suing anyone, but we don't have enough stamina to work on our UI again.

PS: Our product in not a social network

12 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] thread
YoAdrian
Leave it as-is. IIRC, YouTube swiped the newsfeed design from Facebook last year or so. Facebook probably picked up some of these new-to-them UI concepts from other sites. Who cares?
dragos2
Facebook might care. And sue.
josephpmay
This shouldn't be an issue if they have proof that they used the design first.
dragos2
That would be the correct scenario, but you never know these days.
lifeisstillgood
You are building a product that has finished designs for a news feed and you are not launching for another nine months?

Forget Zuckerberg one day might sue you - try launching now and find out if you have built something people want.

Why wait nine months?

eduardordm
There is a hard problem we are solving and requires implementing almost from scratch a few RFCs.

The client part of it is 'finished' actually.

lifeisstillgood
I am sure it is a hard problem, and I am certainly guilty of being quick on a negative comment when you and presumably many others have poured months or years into this. So I am sorry if my comment came over as trivialising.

I would just ask then is there absolutely no part of this that can be useful and valuable without the complete whole?

Are there truly no beta users that would be able to provide feedback or that extra special something a developer gets when her code is actually really in use by someone.

Often I have found a different way to look at a problem and meant it breaks down in new and unexpected ways.

I ask out of love :-)

eduardordm
No problem, really. I didn't take it negatively at all, I understand that's a lot of time.

The best thing we could do to test the product was to find a few users (paying users) and do some mechanical turk work. When the testing period ended they were willing to pay double to continue using the product, but our costs were growing by 10x. They knew upfront it was just a temporary service, we promised them 6 months of free service when we finally finish it.

To mitigate the consequences of our failure, none of us quit our other company (we are working there part time) and we didn't get into debt. We hired some very bright guys to help us, we tried getting things faster by hiring more people, it didn't work out very well.

lifeisstillgood
Ahhhh, different story - I am too used to 20 year olds giving up their jobs to sleep next to the laptop to think there may be other more risk-reasonable people out there :-)

Good luck.

From reading your blog I can guess what you are referring to - I would be interested in interviewing you for my own blog of interesting programming things - any objections?

eduardordm
There is nothing extremely interesting in our project, but anyway, you can email me: eduardo at intermeta.com.br
bbissoon
Good design is good design. Focus on the product and if your product requires a news feed - use it. This mentality of "They will sue" keeps many great ideas in the closet.

Also, no one will sue for User Interface - they will sue for code if that. It's harder in court and not worth much because the same companies looking to improve their UI on a regular basis doesn't want to start a "This is my UI idea" war.

bbissoon
Just to be clear, I'm talking about the web - not OS. In OS there is VERY high consequences due to limited competition but in web - a medium available to ALL, the risk is understood.