Official Site Bumtion Network

Microsoft China have been alleged into coping code snippets, design and UI elements of a popular micro blogging service website, Plurk. The Microsoft service , MSN Juku, was launched in November 2009, and looks almost exactly like Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigating system. Plurk then discovered that 80% of the client and product codebase were stolen directly from Plurk. Juku also copied Plurk’s very unique Karma scoring system that encourages users to update more often in order to unlock more icons.

On late Monday, Microsoft responded by removing the Juku feature while they look into things. They also mentioned that Microsoft’s MSN in China is a joint venture contracted with an independent vendor, however, this does not mean that they can get away with plagiarism. I wonder if Microsoft made any mobile application for its service like Plurk did, that would be interesting to see too. It goes to show that if you're a big company and you wish to copy a service found on the Internet, do not pick Asia's number 1 blogging service to copy from!

Read Plurk's blog for more information and evidence about the plagiarism, meawhile, you can see the obvious resemblance between the two services in the screen captures below.