<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, sugar]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, sugar]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/sugar http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/sugar <![CDATA[PopSugar publisher's Tumblr clone]]> Sugar, the blog network which runs celebrity site PopSugar and fashion site FabSugar, among others, just launched a new blogging tool called OnSugar. Sugar says OnSugar is "sweet and simple publishing." A bit too simple, it turns out. OnSugar looks like a blatant ripoff of Tumblr, the kindergarten-simple blog site popular with Brooklyn and San Francisco's most self-involved Internet users. OnSugar seems to have copied Tumblr's look, feel and features, adding some girly pink. But Sugar's copying was more than just superficial.

Many popular blog services offer "bookmarklets" — software tools, installed in browsers, which allow users to quickly post an article they're reading online. The "Share OnSugar" bookmarklet's source code appears identical to the code Tumblr founder David Karp and engineer Marco Arment wrote for the "Share on Tumblr" bookmarklet. Compare the two, above: Sugar hasn't bothered to do much more to the user interface besided adding tags and categories, which are hidden "advanced options" in Tumblr's bookmarklet. The code is an even closer copy.

Here's the problem for Karp: Though popular with a certain crowd, Tumblr is far from mainstream. So users who fall in love with OnSugar blogs may never learn about the original.

We'd point out that Tumblr itself is just a happily dumbed-down ripoff of LiveJournal, which predates it by nearly a decade and offers all the privacy features Tumblr users have been begging Karp for, but after OnSugar's more blatant blow, that seems cruel.

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<![CDATA[Negroponte to OLPC developers: Pour some Sugar on me!]]> Nicholas Negroponte, the nutty MIT professor who has championed the idea of cheap laptops for Third World children, is feuding with his own programmers. Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child is best known for its distinctive hardware — the candy-colored, devil-horn-antennaed XO notebook computer. But he's turned his attention to Sugar, the Linux-based software which runs on the XO. Negroponte, cozying up to Microsoft, wants Sugar to be rewritten for Windows. Great idea, says OLPC developer C. Scott Ananian — hire 10 Windows developers right away, suspend all other software development, and maybe it will happen.

Scott, Scott, Scott: Negroponte has never been in the business of doing anything. His core competency is talking. The sooner you learn this, the happier you'll be at One Laptop Per Child. Negroponte's goals with One Laptop Per Child are admirable and visionary. As with many visionaries, his contact with reality is infrequent and tenuous. The best way to get OLPC's hardware and software built: Send Negroponte on another worldwide goodwill tour, keeping him as far from the labs as possible.

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