In response to GraffitiGeo Techcrunch article ...

http://www.geograffiti.com/voicemarks/3923/

by oGLOWo • 17 years ago

24 11 17 years ago

geograffiti.com

ErrantX3• 17 years ago

TC Article he is responding too: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/yc-funded-graffitigeo-f...

Here's the app: http://www.graffitigeo.com/

It's basically (it seems) a text version of this existing service: http://www.geograffiti.com/

I think the claim of "rip off" does have some validity :P

pg• 17 years ago

There are a lot of services that do some variant of geotagging. We've even funded one before (Flagr, in 2006). This is one of those domains where winning is a matter of getting the details right; the general idea has been around forever.

I'm guessing what the OP is responding to is the similarity between the names. But that was not intentional.

ErrantX3• 17 years ago

Oh, yeh. That was all I was saying: I'd be suspicious and frustrated too if a new and very similar service appeared using my sites reversed name. It's a valid frustration even if it is innocent.

And did they not check? tut tut website 101 there! :P

aranganath• 17 years ago

I'm the author of Graffitio: http://appsto.re/graffitio

I applied to YC and was flown out for an interview in November 2008. I was told that while it was a promising area, YC is reluctant to fund single founders. Fair enough.

A few weeks later, I responded to a technical plea for help from one of GraffitiGeo's founders in this thread a few weeks after that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413929

When we got in touch, we had a long and frank discussion about Graffitio and the space in general. I told him about the challenges I was facing, and some of my plans for the future. He brought up the idea that we team up, and I said I probably wasn't interested, but I'd let him know.

Then I got the email. He offered me 1.5% of their company for all of my source code, the name, and my 40,000+ users at the time. He went on to use threatening language such as "Graffitio is going to get stomped out of the picture" and "Your financial alternatives are bleak." I chose to pass on the offer.

The first version of GraffitiGeo that came out in the App Store was an _exact_ clone of my app, Graffitio, down to the terminology such as Graffiti and Walls. They started to differentiate themselves with later versions. Some of those differences were novel, but others were features that I'd mentioned to him in our conversation. To be fair, they could have arisen independently.

Graffitio is over a year old now. It was in the App Store on day 1. I should probably be more annoyed than I am, but honestly, I have a lot of reservations about this space now after being here for over a year. Dealing with the App Store is another headache. I haven't been able to get an update through in months. Anyway, the first round of geotagging apps have fallen flat IMO. Turning them into a "game" like Foursquare and GraffitiGeo isn't going to change the fact that they deliver relatively little utility.

There might be a magic combination out there that makes it work, but I don't think GraffitiGeo or Graffitio in their current state is it. I wish them luck in finding it. If anything, they've lit a fire under my ass to spend more time on Graffitio.

In response to GraffitiGeo Techcrunch article ...

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