By way of China Web 2.0 Review: Meebo could be seeing a Beijing firm encroaching its trademark. Meebo.com.cn — which does not, by the way, belong to the original Meebo.com — claims (certainly by way of its simple UI ripoff) to be a Chinese Meebo (at that, most likely an illegal or at least less-than-legitimate Chinese Meebo), dressing up like a Chinese language version of Meebo without giving the original Meebo any credit. The funny thing is this: Meebo.com (the original) does, in fact, have a Chinese version of its website online!
So why the copying? Simple. Meebo.com does not support QQ on a World Wide Web interface. The Chinese “clone” (if we have to call it one) does. Most of China’s IM users use QQ — very much the biggest IM network in the Chinese Internet world.
The Chinese Meebo actually was once known as ImTata, and had services which were nearly like the original Meebo — it allowed you to use a WWW interface to log into popular chat clients. Meebo.com offers suport for AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, MSN (Windows Live Messenger), ICQ and Jabber. The Chinese Meebo offered support for MSN and QQ.
So has the real Meebo taken any actions yet? Not that we’re aware of. Probably Meebo doesn’t want to take a violator without a lot of traffic to court — yet. However, a visit to the Chinese Meebo website still shows us how similar the two look. (If you can’t get to it, click here for a screenshot.)
Not exactly the same, but enough to make more than a few people… pretty suspicious.
Tags: blognation, China, blognation China, Mainland China, Meebo, interface copies
