(Photo: Zurb)

Forrst, a developer network that came out of the 500startups accelerator, announced today that it has been acquired by ZURB, a 15-year-old community for product designers to help companies do design work. This is the second acquisition for Forrst in less than a year; back in March, it was acquired by design community Colourlovers. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

ZURB says it wants to help nurture Forrst into an active design community that can be a place for designers to share ideas and receive feedback. According to a press release, they plan to:

• We will actively listen, participate, and foster the site to build a strong, active Forrst community.

• With a suite of design apps, a top-20 open-source framework (Foundation) and over 15 years of product design experience, we’re excited to lead the Forrst community forward to achieve great things. We’ll start by streamlining the site interface and implementing responsive design for the mobile web.

• We’ll iterate upon and add new Forrst features to help designers and developers collaborate easily and effectively. The invite system will shift to reward users who make consistent, high-quality contributions to the site.

ZURB is a product design company with a three-pronged approach: services, product tools for designers and educational materials. The acquisition will be an asset-only deal, so no Forrst employees will be making the move to ZURB.

"Our purpose as a business is to help people design for people," ZURB's "Chief Instigator" Bryan Zmijewski told Betabeat. "Forrst is a community of designers and developers who are looking to develop their craft. We see alignment with all the other things we've been doing to really help people focus on sharing design feedback."

Mr. Zmijewski assured Betabeat that the community will still be for developers as much as it is for designers. "From a design perspective, we look at it holistically and try to solve product problems and not just interface issues," he said.

Mr. Zmijewski said that Colourlovers, which acquired Forrst back in March 2012, reached out to them to get the acquisition ball rolling. "Sometimes things aren't great fits," he offered.

But we’ll get to that.

Much like unicorns or rent-controlled apartments, software engineers are a rare, fascinating breed. Many are sensitive to sunlight, only wear hoodies and boast a blood composition of 90 percent Mountain Dew. Unencumbered by emotional irrationality, they operate primarily on logic, using highly complicated algorithmic equations to make even the simplest of decisions, like which sushi place to order from. They are obsessive, strange and brilliant, and they make some of the most beloved products in our modern world.

But cultivating a happy developer requires special attention and care: you can't just toss them into a new office environment armed with a cheap tote bag and a laptop riser and expect them to come up with the next Facebook. Both early-stage startups and established technology companies have recognized the creature comforts that are key to attracting and retaining talented developers, and they are far from the typical yearly pizza party that most employees are used to.

“Developers, especially the ones I worked with [at Rackspace], tend to really like being able to sit in front of computers and write code all the time,” said Marisa Keegan, a corporate culture consultant who used to work as a “Culture Maven” at Rackspace. “They don't want to be interrupted or be pulled away from that task of writing code, so flexible work hours are necessary.”

Free food is also a major draw for companies hoping to keep devs happy. “Not to stereotype, but they were young single guys who didn't really want to have to cook their own food, so if we had food for them, they loved it,” said Ms. Keegan.

At the startup at which this reporter used to work, the office was decked out with a ping pong table, a fully stocked fridge and top-notch computer accessories. We were also privy to occasional company treats, like an ergonomic advisor, a masseuse and free pizza every Friday.

Forrst founder and CEO Kyle Bragger told Betabeat over email that he had seen the following first hand: “Those keg machines, workout equipment, booze, nap pods, arcade games, motorized standing desks and treadmills you stand on while working.”

At Asana, a collaborative information managing application, each employee gets $10,000 to customize their workspace, which leaves us to wonder: how much does a Sports Illustrated calendar cost these days? Jason Throckmorton, one of Asana's PR folks, clarified over email that the $10k is meant to cover the cost of a workstation, like a laptop, a mouse, etc. And, admittedly, ergonomically-friendly office chairs don’t come cheap. Tal Safran, a freelance developer at Branch, proudly sent us a picture of his swag-looking $500 home office chair.

Referral programs are also a way that companies encourage developers to bring their talented dev friends into the fold. Plus, it’s easier to keep engineers happy when their friends are around.

“We do have the obvious ping-pong table and well-stocked kitchen. We're big on coffee here: Stumptown or Grady's Coldbrew,” said Annie Werner, a community coordinator at Tumblr. “But perhaps one of the coolest perks is our ‘Refer Madness’ program. Basically, if you make a successful referral, then you get to pick a fun/interesting ‘adventure" you’d like to have for a day, and Tumblr will pay for it. It might be just you, or include other members of your team. A few people cashed in on their Refer Madness bonuses together recently so that we could all take a company field trip to Medieval Times.” (Oh, what we’d do to see David Karp jousting with costumed knights in a gold paper crown.)

And let’s not forget the company-labeled swag, of course.

“T-shirts were a really big deal for Rackers,” said Ms. Keegan. “We had t-shirts for every occasion. One of the projects I worked on was a new recruiting campaign. We interviewed employees and asked them what drew them to work for Rackspace, and one of the developers said, ‘If it weren't for all the free shirts, I’d have to come to work naked.’ So that actually became one of our recruiting campaign for software developers.”

Google is famous for its swath of drool-worthy perks offered at the legendary Googleplex, the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Employees enjoy daily meals prepared by world-class chefs, special rooms designated for taking naps, sporadically-placed massage chairs and even Japanese toilets with seat warmers and built-in bidets. In the summer, you can take a dip in the wave pool that lies smack in the middle of the Googleplex. This reporter has seen these things with her own eyes! And they are magnificent.

“I love Google's perks but I by no means feel I MUST have any of them,” said Mike LeBeau, a senior software engineer at Google, in an email. “I think a lot of the perks are really effective and a very smart way to keep employees happy and productive.”

While the food and games are great, some developers don't require material goods as much as a relaxed company culture to get their coding juices flowing. You know, like a place that's okay with bare feet.

“I take my shoes off,” said Mr. Safran. “It's not necessary, but way more comfy.”

Whatever works.

Mr. Bragger (Photo by Dan Wilby, danwilby.com)

Forrst, the professional community for designers and coders launched by Kyle Bragger, announced today that it has officially been acquired by Colourlovers, an Oregon-based design community. Not bad for a company created on a whim.

Colourlovers is an international creative community that focuses on sharing colors, palettes and patterns. Forrst, which began as an elite invite-only blog network for developers, grew at lightening speed, its success even catching Mr. Bragger off guard.

"I think for us it just made a whole lot of sense," Mr. Bragger told Betabeat via phone. "Colourlovers has been around a long time and now they have Creative Market which is another property they're working on. Forrst fits really nicely in between because we've always been about helping people get better at their craft, and providing a really strong community along feedback of design development and the intersection between the two."

Hardcore developers who are worried that Forrst will morph into an "Etsy for digital bling" need not fret. Mr. Bragger said the details of how the sites will integrate are still being worked out, but that Forrst will stay true to its dev roots.

"Colourlovers and Creative Market are more design-oriented," said Mr. Bragger. "But I think the creative space in general really applies to code, and certainly the intersection of design and code. We're not kicking out all of our users who are developers and we're not drastically shifting to design only. Forrst is going to remain the Forrst that everyone has known over the last two and a half years, and get better from there."

Mr. Bragger told Betabeat that Forrst is now owned by Colourlovers' parent company, ChromaOm, but that it will continue to operate autonomously, with its original staff intact. "Forrst is going to continue to be Forrst and operate as its own product," he said. "We have zero plans to shutdown. Too much of that stuff is going down and I'm really thrilled that that's not something we're doing. I never would've sold had it been a talent acquisition. Forrst is a really special place and I'm glad that it will continue to be that."

Mr. Bragger will continue to lead product development at Forrst, which will keep its office in New York. "Nothing's really changing for me," he said. Except that he just netted a ton of dough--though a gentleman never reveals an acquisition price. "Can't disclose how much it was for, but everyone is happy with the outcome," he admitted.

SKILLSHARE EVERYWHERE. Skillshare had two big announcements yesterday: 1) the democratized education platform is available in "every major city" in the U.S. now, and 2) CEO Mike Karnjanaprakhorn has been named one of 12 TED fellows in 2012.

FORRST RANGERS. The developer community Forrst has started posting jobs. Bring it on, Stack Overflow.

SAVE AMIT. The campaign for Amit Gupta continues! Upcoming: bone marrow drive in Delhi and swabbing party in Somerville and much, much more.

DREAM TEAM. New Work City is joining forces with the hackers of NYC Resistor to cross-promote events. Synergy!

XX INNOVATION LUNCH. "I’m super psyched for my lunch this Friday," Charlie O'Donnell wrote in his newsletter this week.  "Marissa Campise from Venrock and Sarah Tavel from Bessemer are co-hosting a lunch with me for up and coming women entrepreneurs to get a chance to meet venture investors."

CLINGLE! "It’s time to Clingle! MyCityWay, developer of the popular urban city apps has launched Clingle, a first-of-its-kind personalized mega-utility location-based social network ... What is Clingle? Clingle is a social network that connects people with their friends and the world around them. One of the most unique features of Clingle are 'Clings'--personal messages (text, pictures, audio and coming soon, video) that can be left for friends at favorite locations, and only unlocked by them when they check-in. The app is brought to you by the same team who created MyCityWay, a BMW iVenture backed and 2009 NYC Big Apps award-winning app. The free app can be downloaded from the iTunes store at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clingle/id449924410?mt=8.

ADD TO NESTIO. Nestio.com, a real estate listings manager, a week ago launched support for nationwide listings  and announced a partnership with eBay to include "add to Nestio" buttons on every listing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Wanderfly is a year old and has "inspired 4 million trips with users from 217 countries, won a Webby nomination, Top 10 Startup by Time Inc. & Top 100 Brilliant Companies by Entrepreneur, and launched our recommendation technology on 1000 NYTimes.com pages." And made themselves a birthday infographic.

IMMACULATE LAUNCH. "Over the last two and a half years, a community of like minded individuals in good taste has formed around Immaculate Infatuation. Co-founded by Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal, two music business executives, Immaculate Infatuation has become NYC's go-to resource for honest, no bullsh*t restaurant reviews." Coolio and Gary Vaynerchuk are users.

MONIES. "OpenSky.com, the shopping destination that allows members to design their ideal shopping experience curated by some of the world’s most interesting people, today announced it has secured $30 million financing from new and current investors.  New investor Providence Equity Partners led the financing, which included participation from existing investors Highland Capital Partners, Canaan Partners and The Raine Group."

"GramercyOne is developer of cloud-based booking, business management, and marketing software used by more than 2500 businesses worldwide.Today, we’re announcing that the company has raised $14.5 million in Series A funding round led by Revolution Ventures (chaired by AOL founder Steve Case)."

TECHIES FOR CHARITY. A formal group of NYC technology and advertising executives will run the New York City Marathon on November 6 and raise money for Camp Interactive, "a 10-year-old non-profit that exposes inner-city kids to both technology and the outdoors that is very active here in NYC." The Team InterActive NYC Marathon team consists of: Matt Siegel, COO and Co-Founder of IndabaMusic; Toby Daniels, CEO of Crowdcentric; Peter Miron, CTO of Knewton; Michelle DeForest, Director of Marketing and Strategy at DOTGO; David Pashman, Legal Team Leader at Meetup; James Cooper, Chief Creative Innovation Officer at JWT and more. "As of October 24, the team has raised more than $47,000 for the organization and hopes to bring in $100,000 total."

WE ARE ALL A VC. On Thursday, a meetup for readers of the Fred Wilson blog.

WHO'S HIRING? RollingStone.com listed a job in this week's Inside Startups newsletter--but it's not for a developer. Want to be a national director of digital ad sales? "Candidate will be a seasoned sales executive who will execute an aggressive growth plan to grow the overall digital business."

The bloodthirsty hunt for hackers is getting extreme. Developers get come-ons by email, through Facebook, cold calls; their listservs are invaded, their hackathons are stalked. But here comes Tinyproj, a simple solution to at least part of the problem. Kyle Bragger, creator of developer hub Forrst.com, has set up a mechanism for getting technical talent for short-term projects. It's called Tinyproj. Think the "gigs" section on Craigslist. "People want short-term work," he told Betabeat. "I had a hunch this could be interesting and valuable to people."

"By short-term, we mean projects that range in budget from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and should take no more than a few weeks to complete," Tinyproj explains. "Tinyproj is not the right place for finding full-time employees or bidding out huge projects."

Tinyproj works like this: developers sign up for free. Project creators submit proposals and a budget; if Mr. Bragger approves the project, the creator pays $25 and it's blasted out in a Saturday email to Tinyproj freelancers, who then respond to specific proposals and negotiate directly with the project creators. Emails are even anonymized for project creators and developers via another New York project, fiesta.cc.

Mr. Bragger has already signed up more than 4,000 developers in two days, thanks to an ad on Forrst, a Hacker News placement and "a few tweets," he said. There are 20 paid projects going out on the list this weekend, he said. Only approved and paid projects go out; approved and unpaid projects get an email saying "your project could have gone out to 4,000 people today, but we still need payment."

A FEW MONTHS AGO, AN ENTREPRENEUR in the tri-state area was soliciting web development help via Craigslist. “I’m looking for a Meetup.com clone script,” the listing said. “It must have all the social community features that Meetup.com has, including the capability to add new groups, users events, polls, connect to other social communities, shopping cart, sponsors and sub sites.” Meetup, which was founded in 2002 and has about 80 employees, is reportedly valued at more than $50 million. The asking price for a replica was $300 to $600.

Last week, two ads appeared from the other side of the fence: a programmer-for-hire looking for something to build who claimed to have built a Facebook clone in four days, a Flickr clone in three days and a Google clone in two weeks. He noted that he’d also created a Craigslist clone, adding, “but no one visits it so we are posting this ad to Craigslist.”*

When it comes to internet startups, much is made of the entrepreneurs who first bring an idea to market—innovators or "first movers," in the parlance of market researchers. But vastly more common are “fast followers,” the ones who jump on a hot idea and dash off a carbon copy. After all, the first mover doesn’t always win the race: just look at the Mac, launched in 1984, versus the Windows PC, launched in 1985, or at Facebook, which came after Friendster, Myspace and the Winklevoss social network HarvardConnection.

Turntable.fm, a music streaming service that went viral immediately after its April launch, was built in about six months by three entrepreneurs based in Union Square. About two months later, a local trio of former Googlers launched a music streaming game called Rolling.fm.

The similarity was more than striking. Both sites are designed to look like a cartoon night club where users can join a rotating line-up of D.J.s and play songs for a crowd of tiny avatars. Turntable listeners rate songs as “lame” or “awesome,” while users on Rolling rate them “weak” or “hot.” On Turntable, users appear as ambiguous elf-animals that get bigger as they accrue more D.J. points; on Rolling, the characters look like Homie dolls that get more bling as they level up. “I think it’s obvious that the initial version of Rolling is inspired by Turntable,” Rolling co-founder Tim Zhou said carefully in an email. “To say otherwise is not accurate.”

Fast followers have been around since the days of the first dot-com boom. Even Kozmo.com, the website that offered free one-hour delivery of almost any product and is considered one of the classic flame-outs of the 90's tech bubble, had, despite its dubious business model, an imitator.

According to Silicon Alley Reporter publisher Jason Calacanis, one venture capitalist Kozmo pitched—Ross Stevens of Integrity Capital Management—liked the idea so much he launched a competitor. “They started something called Urbanfetch, which was a direct knockoff,” Mr. Calacanis said. This led to a legal settlement as well as retaliatory mischief; at one point, Kozmo had five employees order packs of M&Ms delivered to the office every hour, “just to see if Urbanfetch would do it,” Mr. Calacanis said.

Me-too startups seem to be popping up with increasing intensity amid the current wave of social media–centric web-based businesses, in which easy programming languages, the availability of ready-made tools, open source code and a reinvigorated supply of capital has everyone aspiring to internet entrepreneurship. “It’s this whole cargo cult thing, where people imitate the things you see on the surface,” web developer and serial entrepreneur Kyle Bragger told Betabeat. “Foursquare does badges and they did them really well. And then all of a sudden everyone was like, ‘I want to add badges to my startup!’”

There are more than 200 variations of the “daily deal” group discount site Groupon (commonly referred to as the “Groupon clones") in the U.S. alone. In China, more than 1,000 have been launched and several hundred more are offering deals around the world, according to the New York-based deal aggregator and market researcher Yipit. These carbon copies range from bit-for-bit replicas to fairly creative takes on the concept of temporary group discounts.

Groupon’s wild success inspired Google to launch its own take on the daily deal site, Google Offers; at the other end of the knockoff spectrum, some intrepid entrepreneurs started offering a quick-and-dirty $350 software kit called Wroupon, which imitates Groupon’s daily deal conceit as well as the layout and language to generate “the perfect Groupon clone.”

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

Meanwhile, the proliferation of "patent trolling," frivolous lawsuits brought against startups based on overreaching software patents, has been in the news lately. How can overzealous intellectual property prosecution coincide with a rise of the clones?

The reasons for both have to do with the country's overloaded, backed-up patent system. A startup’s design and branding can be protected with a copyright or trademark, which takes six months to a year to process. A new technology or method, like Groupon’s “tipping point,” would need to be protected with a patent in order for Groupon to take its clones to court. But a patent application usually takes two or three or three years to be examined—an eternity for a web 2.0 startup—and it’s never certain whether it will be granted, said Elliot Furman, a patent lawyer who has a masters degree in engineering from Stanford and specializes in software and web start-ups. And even if a company owns a patent, legal action is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Pursuing a case is often not worth it to a young startup, especially those in the earlier stage who are working with limited funds.

Groupon, for example, can’t sue for patent infringement: it doesn't own any patents yet. The startup filed for a patent on its flash deal mechanism, “a system and methods to mutually satisfy a consumer with a discount and a vendor with a minimum number of sales by establishing a tipping point associated with an offer for a good or service,” in 2009. That and five other applications are still pending. The patents are very specific: rather than attempting to patent the idea of a tipping point-based discount, the application describes a series of 10 successive actions that describe Groupon’s particular implementation. But Groupon has raised more than a billion dollars and therefore has the resources to pursue other kinds of intellectual property lawsuits. The company sued at least one of its clones, the Australia-based Scoopon, for registering the trademark “Groupon” and squatting on groupon.com.au. The case settled out of court. Facebook game-maker Zynga, another billion-dollar company, is suing São Paulo-based Vostu for copyright infringement while simultaneously defending itself against a lawsuit from Los Angeles-based SocialApps, which is suing Zynga for copyright infringement, violations of the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act and other claims.

SocialApps claims that Zynga used its code to build Farmville without adequate compensation. But most derivative startups don’t steal code—they look at a site and reverse-engineer what they see. “Most of these companies are using more or less standardized protocols,” Mr. Furman said. “They may even be using off-the-shelf software.” The service built on top of the technology, he said, is in most cases what companies want to legally protect with patents for the way the service works, copyrights for the way it looks and trademarks for the name and branding.

Fast-follower startups are an international industry, much like the “fast fashion houses” such as H&M and Zara that spot a new design on the runway and place cheap knockoff in stores just months later. China has its own versions of most successful startups—which, conveniently enough, tend to be blocked by the government’s censors—including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Quora and a score of Tumblr clones such as Dian Dian, which differentiated itself in its first iteration with Chinese writing and a darker shade of blue. German entrepreneurs Oliver, Marc and Oliver Samwer are notorious for producing copycat start-ups. The brothers attempted to partner with eBay to launch the German version of the auction site; when eBay didn’t respond, they made their own--which they sold to eBay for $50 million four months after it went live, according to the New York Times. Oliver Samwer co-authored a book in 1998 called America’s Most Successful Startups: Lessons for Entrepreneurs. One of their incubated startups, Wimdu, is a mirror image of the short-term rentals site Airbnb which is valued at $1 billion dollars. Airbnb said of Wimdu: “These scam artists have a history of copying a website, aggressively poaching from their community, then attempting to sell the company back to the original.” Wimdu told us it’s building a business, not angling to be bought.

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

But unlike the so-called patent trolls—companies that exist solely to extract money from new start-ups via broad, vaguely-worded software patents—the fast followers are considered an acceptable part of the web ecosystem rather than contemptible parasites. Like the fast fashion houses, fast follower startups serve different markets, iterate on the originals, and keep first movers moving fast to stay ahead.

As University of Washington professor and former Microsoftie Scott Berkun says in his book The Myths of Innovation, all new inventions are basically collaborative. Technology evolves by group effort. Even the Chinese clones, safe in their protected market, eventually start innovating on the original ideas. “Zhihu [Quora clone] and DianDian [Tumblr clone] are following a common pattern of Chinese internet companies. Copy first, innovate later,” Kai Lukoff wrote on the Chinese tech blog TechRice. “Clones though they may be at present, I personally find myself rooting for these upstarts.”

In January, Match.com introduced a feature called DateSpark, which Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder of the local dating site HowAboutWe, thought looked familiar. “The Match implementation was, like, a very overt copy of HowAboutWe, the language, the design,” Mr. Schildkrout said. “It was kind of like an ugly, poor duplicate of what we had built. I felt like it was a little lame but I understand why they would do it and felt simultaneously that it was really affirming.” Match.com did not respond to a request for comment.

Hitting back, HowAboutWe offered Match.com subscribers a three-month subscription for free, though Mr. Schildkrout sounded decidedly unthreatened by the larger company. “The core outdated lameness of Match persisted,” he said. “It would have been cool if they did what we did and did it better, so we could learn from them.”

Does HowAboutWe copy other people? we asked.

“Yeah, constantly,” he said, citing Twitter and OKCupid. “I wouldn't say copy but we have taken huge pieces of ideas from other people and their great implementations—that’s part of what being a great user experience designer is. I think that’s a healthy dialogue that exists between competing companies.”

HowAboutWe has not attempted to patent the idea of a dating site built around proposing date ideas. “Our task is to be incredibly innovative, creative, try things quickly and figure out what works, kill what doesn't work, continue to iterate on what does, and therefore beat out anybody that's trying to copy us,” he said.

Entrepreneurs do often have identical ideas independently as technological evolution makes new things possible. The emergence of services like Twilio, which makes it easy for developers to send text messages and make phone calls from mobile apps, inspired a staggering number of group texting startups around the same time, including GroupMe, Groupie, Fast Society and the recently-folded Freespeech, and that’s just in New York. Mr. Furman gets waves of clients who ask him about patenting the same thing. “In a month, six or seven people come to me with virtually the same idea!” he told Betabeat.

But it’s a different story when there is a possibility of consumer confusion. A trademark application takes only six to 12 months to process, and it only costs a few hundred bucks to send a cease-and-desist letter, as the New York-based founders of the application-hosting service Nodejitsu did when an Arizona startup offering the same service launched under the similar name NodeFu.

At the time, the NodeFu website referred indirectly to Nodejitsu: “We started this project because the ‘other’ node.js hosting services were not sending out coupon invitations.” But NodeFu’s founder Chris Matthieu said the branding was unrelated. “There is a trend in the software industry now around ninjas and apps/sites ending in the suffix ‘fu,’” he said in an email. “In addition for my fondness of ninjas, my son is also a black belt in karate and a red belt in kungfu. I have been surrounded by martial arts for 14 years now. There really isn’t that much in common between the Nodefu and Nodejitsu sites other than being oriental. I didn’t see any ninjas on their site. Not sure what the big deal is nor do I see any concerns with copyright.”

Still, Mr. Matthieu later changed his company’s name to Nodester.

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

*UPDATE: This ad turned out to be a parody. "This can't possibly generate any responses, I thought," writes Ted Dziuba, the listing's author. "Nope. 31 replies in about 2 hours, before Craigslist pulled the post."

A version of this story appeared in print in the New York Observer the week of Sept. 2, 2011.

New York's increasingly-popular start-up Forrst, a Tumblr-esque forum for designers and developers, appears to be the victim of a rather blatant ripoff from the Emerald Isle. A freelance Irish designer, Eamonn Murphy, has a splash page up for Furrst.com, "an exciting new web app for designers who care about content."

Uh, wait a second. Didn't someone else do that furrst?

It's not clear what features or functionality he plans to offer that could be similar to Forrst's. The designer does not have an account on Forrst, but a firm listing Furrst as a client does. He's been working on the site since November, but has only publicly shared designs for icons that give only little hints as to what the product will be.

Forrst is suing Mr. Murphy in the New York Southern District Court for trademark infringement. "The law isn't concerned with anything other than it's for designers, it's almost identical to our name, and it's for feedback around client/designer feedback about copy," says Forrst founder Kyle Bragger. He has not heard back anything "of substance" from the accused party.

The plot thickens--Furrst says it's supported by official government funding through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, which distributes lottery funds to arts organizations, artists and groups. They'll be happy to hear about this!

Furrst has been largely silent on updates, but in April Mr. Murphy tweeted "Building up a nice collection of Furrst related swag." Perhaps he can save said swag for a future start-up that has nothing to do with design.

UPDATE: Furrst and Forrst have reached an "amicable agreement" and Furrst is changing its name to something less similar to Forrst. It was not their intent to infringe, Furrst told Forrst.

Forrst was "originally a Pinboard/Delicious style utility for code and design. It was stupid simple but had a following model that inadvertently sparked the community growth," Mr. Bragger writes.

He also drops some inside info about New York's more niche revenue-generating social media start-up. "How much cash do you generate?" one user asked. "Last month we made ~$13k. It's been growing month over month," Mr. Bragger said, although he says Forrst is not profitable yet. MOst of that revenue comes from paid accounts and on-site transactions, he said.

Forrst just hit 40 percent "active users" accessing the site per month, where the account is at least 30 days old and the user creates some content, he said.

Mr. Bragger also did some signposting: "Working on slimming down the UI and trimming features that suck or are underused. Working on closing some sponsorship deals that could make us profitable overnight. Also have plans to roll out company accounts (for agencies and such) and a revamp of Forrst.me (which ended up being pretty successful for us)."

Mike Evans, podcast mogul.

Have you heard the excellent, occasionally dirty Forrst podcast about the developer community, design and technology, broadcast four times a week? You should. The start-up has cranked out more than 100 of them, and Forrst's Detroit-based moderator Mike Evans is the production guru behind it all. "Go my route and you start thinking you're CNN junior," he wrote in an email.

Today Mr. Evans posted a walkthrough tour of the studio he's been building for more than six months:

Epic Podcasting Forrst Style from magic6435 on Vimeo.

But the studio is too pimp not to share: Mr. Evans plans to rent and/or lend the space to local groups in the Detroit creative scene.

"As of now I'm looking to get the word out because I want to offer the space to the Detroit art/tech/DIY scene to start producing local shows. In the next few weeks after I obtain a few more pieces of equipment I plan to do to total walkthrough of the setup explaining each piece of hardware and how it all works," he said.

UPDATE: Mr. Evans clarifies in a comment below: "Not really looking to rent as much as bring people in and collaborate on shows. There are tons of topics we are interested in that we are not experts on such as urban farming, DIY building, Science/Green topics, urban art etc. We want to build a network to represent these types of view points."

The Forrst community.

"There's been some discomfort recently with some of the perceived quality of posts," Forrst founder Kyle Bragger wrote this morning in a blog post introducing new community guidelines for the site, a community-dependent Tumblr-esque forum where programmers showcase code and talk shop. "We're also going to start enforcing a minimum threshold for what we deem a quality post. This does not mean quality in the sense of skill; rather, we are looking for a minimum amount of effort; we'd rather not see posts that clearly had very little effort put into them. That's not to say that you can or should only post polished design and code, but it does mean that you should be thoughtful about what you're sharing with the community. Posts that were obviously made in 30 seconds (and indeed, many even have descriptions along the lines of "made in 30 seconds was bored LOL") won't likely meet this threshold."

"It's a hard pill for some to swallow coming from other networks where it's a free for all," Mr. Bragger told Betabeat. But the crackdown was necessary because what makes Forrst unique--and worth paying $5 an acorn for--is the quality, he said. Previously the site enforced a reputation system that made users take responsibility for the actions of new users they'd invited, but it proved too intimidating and existing users were afraid to hinge their reputations by inviting friends. Forrst rolled that mechanism back and opened up the invite system more generally to let in some of the 30,000 people on the wait list.

But that flood of new users, coupled with instances of off-topic, blatantly self-promotional and half-assed posts threatened the value of the site for all users. "The #forrst is burning down, run for your lives folks. The trolls have lit a match and all the crud has caught fire," one user tweeted today.

Mr. Bragger decided it was time to tell his users this wasn't Tumblr or the similar work showcase forum Dribble.

"While we realize this may come off as extreme to some, there are plenty of places to post teaser shots, low effort work, etc. We'd love to see Forrst continue to thrive as a place where substantial and thoughtful discussion is a regular occurrence," he wrote. Hence the new rules.

This makes Forrst sound like it's no fun, Betabeat told Mr. Bragger, and he agreed.