That's pretty reasonable. I'll try to make more salient arguments next time. A Memo To The Internet is more of a rant board... but I'll start cleaning it up.

Have you listened to/talked to any of the 37signals guys? It's hard to believe you would make such silly arguments if you had.

(I'd respond on the post itself, but there's a lot more noise in those comments.)

By the way, I love the walking man. What gave you the idea to combine ASCII art and animated GIFs?

Being the founder of OpenDNS makes him a smart guy? Most of the 37Signals products were harder to build and more useful than OpenDNS.

So hard to build that google replicated one in a week? :/

It often takes much longer to design something simple than it does to implement it.

In some cases, yes I agree. But a chatroom is a pretty proven design. Scrolling output, user list on the right, input bar at the bottom.... and that's pretty much it. I doubt even 37signals would claim they designed that.

It's like IE complainging that firefox also has an address bar at the top, and back/forward/reload buttons.

If that was the case, why weren't there 100 other applications that looked just like Campfire prior to its release?

Yes, it does.