People need to realize that the behavior of copying each other’s features did not just start this week. Months ago,  Facebook incorporated “Like” into their features, and at that time the Friendfeed community also accused Facebook of being unoriginal. But Tumblr had had their own version of “liking” for a while. Now, even Google Reader incorporated “liking” and it has become perhaps a best-practice in social networking. Even tagging in Twitter is not entirely original. Tagging behavior came from the grass root when users started using Twitter as a conversation tool. There are other examples to mention, but suffice it to say, it’s been a fair game to incorporate your competitors’ features into your own.

Is this a bad thing? No. We see it in other industries too. Customers demand it, in fact. The intermittent wiper is not unique to Ford. QWERTY keyboard is not unique to Blackberry. Certain community may have a sense of superiority when their feature is getting copied by another platform, but this is still fair game. It benefits the users if platforms continue to look at what their competitors are doing.