PacMee Malaysia is A Twitter Replica

I never knew what Pacmee albeit the Nuffnang advertisement which was running on this weblog a couple of weeks back. It was until I saw it in action at Timothy Tiah’s blog yesterday then I realized the fact.

It is just like…Twitter.com!

Being a website designer, I live around the web and stumble more around the web without the use of StumbleUpon. In simple words, I surf the Internet at least 10-12 hours daily. I’ve several things to do online from writing in this blog to reading the multiple RSS feeds of different genres.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about a service which has replicated another existing service with I would dare say, the same look! Not design but look.

It would make more complete sense to tell you about this with a visual guide. Okay, so you have your ‘Made in Malaysia’ PacMee social networking website at PacMee.com. Its About Us never shared much about the company involved but you will know Maxis (Hotlink) is backing this project up at the moment. But from what I know is the company recently released this with an awareness campaign with the help of Nuffnang.

On the other corner, we have the initial guys that came up with this idea of keeping track with your friends using this widget. Twitter has been around for many months if not 1 year already. So you could say they were technically the ‘first’ to come up with this.

If you look at both the screenshots in a larger image (click to view them), you will notice another shocking fact. It was to me anyway. Both of these websites look somewhat similar or some would even comment they are the same. I know how design can be a challenging factor but I would have at least thought PacMee would do more than to replicate the layout here.

And you want to know what’s even more funny. The copy used for the signup is exactly the same. Is it because “Want an account? Join for FREE! It’s fast and easy.” works unusually well or is it because there are just no other ways of conveying a better message.

What drove me in writing this post was how myshoutout triggered my memory of twitter via the widget used on the blog or website. PacMee is on your left and Twitter is on your right. It’s more difficult to say the design is the same but it is too easy to not admit the look and feel is the same. But I have to hand it to PacMee, the inclusion of the photo and name is a plus from me.

As they may have said, competition is always healthy in business. And on the bright side, you pay a little less to use something like Twitter in Malaysia. While PacMee has a local telco provider charging at RM0.25 – RM0.50 per message transmitted to its server, Twitter would cost more because you’ll have to send the message overseas every time. That is roughly RM1.00 per message.

I’ve seen ideas replicated but concepts changed a little. I’ve seen Lim Kok Wing University website copied and not changed at all by the copycat. Nevertheless, I welcome PacMee to the foray of a Web 2.0 service but would still strongly suggest they do something to the layout or design of their website.

There are several ways to look Web 2.0 and you guys (PacMee) need to revamp the website before more people realize this, especially Twitter and its followers.

Question of the day:
Does PacMee resemble Twitter to you?

[tags]pacmee, pirated, replica, ripoff, twitter, website[/tags]

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