flickr.com/scobleizer

It seems no opportunity for romance is outside the purview of dating site HowAboutWe. Hence this recap of the pickins for participants at Davos, the Model U.N. for wealthy grown-ups. Apparently, "the dynamics at Davos are basically the same as the dynamics of any other group of human beings." We're as shocked as you are!

The primary source for the post was a nameless tech CEO, who swore the younger attendees, at least, kept it pretty chaste:

“There’s a bizarrely non-sexual attitude in Davos,” the tech CEO said. “You can dance around with men or women with abandon…but it’s only the older delegates who seem to push to take someone up to a hotel room.”

Who knew Nobel laureates and their jet-setting ilk were so handsy?

The after-dark scene was reportedly even a bit quieter this year, despite party boy Sean Parker's best efforts. "This year the mood seemed less revelrous, particularly after two of the most exclusive gatherings—Accel Partners and the Google Party—were cancelled," says HowAboutWe.

But it seems at least a couple of techies found the opportunity to get their freak on. And so there appears this intriguing little blind item:

Despite the real estate hurdles, some managed just fine—one global shaper was overheard bragging to her friends that she’d gone home the previous night with the CEO of one of the world’s most prominent web startups.

Disclaimers! First off, anyone seriously identified as a "global shaper" is, more likely than not, embroidering on the details of her conquest. We'd also wager there's a bit of telephone at work here. (There's a reason hearsay isn't admissible in a court of law.)

Nonetheless, to the nameless CEO, we say: You saucy devil. Also, maybe screen for discretion in your paramours.

Soundcloud CEO Mr. Ljung (Photo: Twitter.com)

SoundCloud Busts Out Of Beta At this point, SoundCloud is basically the audio version of YouTube. A private-beta version of the site launched earlier this year called Next and the newest version integrates a bunch of those social features that the company hopes will help its users discover new music. “From today, ‘Next’ is now simply SoundCloud,” said Alexander Ljung, founder and CEO of SoundCloud in a press release sent to Betabeat. “It’s a platform for people to discover new, original music and audio, for creators to build audiences, and for everyone to share what they hear whether online or on mobile.”

The company claims that users now post over 10 hours of music and audio every minute while reaching over 180 million people. That’s a staggering 8% of the entire internet population, every month. On December 6th, mobile users will be able to enjoy reposts, updated mobile search, and UX updates on both iOS and Android SoundCloud apps.

Birds Do It, Bees Do It Online dating site HowAboutWe is now partnering with AARP to launch a new dating site for 50+ adults. Although millenials might find it the concept hard to swallow, it has potential to be one of the biggest sites out of HowAboutWe’s 32 partnered sites. The 50+ demographic is a huge growing dating demographic because of a huge increase in the divorce rate for people over 50. Hey, everybody needs some love!

Remember, Remember, The Facebook Of Last December Timehop, the app that reminds you of all the social media memories you made in your not-so-distant past, has a bunch of updates dropping in its latest update. You can now share pictures from your camera roll in your Timehop feed. First Foursquare checkins are now integrated into your memories too. Just when everyone forgot you were once mayor of Tom and Jerry’s…

You Must Be This Rich To Ride Free Valet, the travel membership site that offers you rewards and guides for $199 a year, told Betabeat over email that it's now in more than 52 cities and more than 100 hotels. They've offering free rides to the airport until February 1st for members staying at any of their New York hotels. The deal is also being offered to New York members who are on their way to stay at a Valet site somewhere else.

We Like To (Watch Them) Move It Move It Yesterday, Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, kicked off its "Innovators on the Move" series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. The first video in the series features the wedding planning tool, Lover.ly, founder Kellee Khalil. Lover.ly is moving into a brand new New York office and the video chronicles the move.

Innovators on the Move: Kellee from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Etsy Goes Full Mobile Etsy has officially released an Android version of its mobile app, after last week's launch of the company's iPad app. In a press release sent to Betabeat, Etsy said that nearly a quarter of its mobile web visitors come from Android devices all over the world. To celebrate the occasion, you should buy yourself this Android mascot cookie jar.

Big Money To Nice People Google is trying hard to tip the scales more toward good than evil. The company has just launched the Global Impact Awards, which honors nonprofits using technology to tackle problems. The inaugural recipients include a $5 million gift to charity: water, a $5 million prize to Donors Choose, and $2.4 million to Givedirectly, a much younger company than the others.

Lose That Basic Black Jackthreads and designer Adam Gianotti have just released the new collection of their line, Viveshirt. The team has also just put their fall collection from their line Goodale on sale. There's a lot of French terry in both collections and some perfect pieces for that "fancy hoodie" look.

Tweeters Be Shopping Some of those absymal Black Friday stats may be misleading. While IBM reported that 0.34 percent of all online sales over Thanksgiving weekend came from social sites, Jirafe, an ecommerce analytics platform found much higher numbers. Using their unique analytics, the company found that 1.27 percent of sales come from social sites like Facebook and Twitter. A key difference between their analytics is that Jirafe looks at the social media profiles of shoppers. Say for instance a customer buys a product after clicking through from a tweet featuring a new deal. Jirafe can track this data while IBM only looks at ads.

Consumer Cash Flow Consmr, a mobile app that provides ratings and reviews for products, announced earlier this week that it has secured $565,000 in seed funding. The round was led by Lerer Ventures with participation from IA Ventures and MESA+. In a press release sent to Betabeat, CEO Ryan Charles said, “Consmr is well positioned to mobilize the wisdom of the crowds and extend it to everyday product decisions.”

Pictures included in the 2,000 online dating profiles Betabeat purchased for $70.

Angela is a 34-year-old single woman from Alabama. She’s a Leo. According to her online dating profile, she is 5’8” with blue eyes and dark brown hair. “I am a creative, witty, intelligent girl looking for someone to shower with all my love and affection!” she declares, appending a smiley face.

Angela was included in a 1,000-pack of allegedly single, supposedly American women, which Betabeat purchased for $35. Her profile is one of a purported 14.9 million for sale on SaleDatingProfiles.com, where the inventory also includes 10,000 U.K. profiles for $200; 15,000 Russians for $240, and 70,000 Australians for $95. A pack of 2,500 lesbian profiles goes for $120, or 4.8 cents apiece; gay men are .003 cents each and are sold in a pack of 410,000. “High quality Gays adult dating profiles for sale with multiplay photos located in USA, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries,” the offer states. At the time of writing, SaleDatingProfiles was having a 75-percent-off spring sale.

Angela, who asked that her last name be withheld, has been dating online for years. But she never imagined her profile was for sale on the open market, or that it now appears on MeetGirlsGuys.com, which she never signed up for. “I have never even heard of that site!” she said, adding that she lives in Texas, not Alabama, and the photo is at least seven years old.

Online dating is a fast-growing industry, with current revenues estimated to run between $1.5 and $3 billion a year. But every new dating site faces the same problem: finding souls to mate. Recruiting new customers is expensive; industry experts put the customer acquisition price at $1 to $5 per person.

SaleDatingProfiles and its competitors BuyProfiles.com and DatingProfilesSale.com offer a shortcut. They sell bulk packages of profiles that seem to include a fair number of actual singles alongside somewhat more questionable Russian beauties, Nigerian bankers and half-empty profiles, which sometimes sell for less than a dime a dozen.

Betabeat emailed 208 men and women whose profiles are being sold on SaleDatingProfiles. Most didn’t reply; 35 emails bounced. Only five people responded, none of whom knew their profiles were for sale. Harry Lin, a 61-year-old in Switzerland, noticed that a profile he started at Jumpdates.com had somehow made its way to Mega Dating and the now-defunct Sensual-Attraction.com. “They have my email, user name, birthday and *former* Jumpdates password!” he wrote in an email.

Buying and selling profiles is just one of many unsavory tactics in the online dating industry. One site owner referred to these practices as “black hat dating.”

“There is a lot of tricky stuff that people do out there that most people don’t know about,” said David Evans, who started the profile editing service Profile Doctor in 2002 and now writes the blog Online Dating Insider and consults for dating startups.

The industry has been dominated by a few giants for about a decade: eHarmony and Match.com, which each claim 20 million members. But recently, niche sites like JDate, ChristianMingle, AsianBeauties.com, Must Love Pets and FarmersOnly have become trendy.

Each new dating site needs faces for its catalog, and much of the dubious behavior is driven by the need for more profiles. “I talk to dating startups a couple times a week,” Mr. Evans said. “Everyone wants to talk about the cold database problem.”

A close cousin to the profile seller is the “white label” dating service. Want to start a new dating site? White label databases are often used to pre-populate niche sites. With services like Dating Factory, WhiteLabelDating or World Dating Partners, you can tap into a large database, slap your logo on top, and advertise that you have hundreds of thousands of members. As new people sign up for your site, their profiles get copied into the main database to be reused by other sites.

Sometimes the white label-powered sites ask new customers where they want their profiles to appear, but usually it’s a clause buried deep in the terms of service that allows “affiliate sites” to share profiles. Did you sign up for HotEquestrianDates? Your profile might show up on BikerRomance—which could make for an awkward first date. But since daters tend to find out about this practice when they get a message from someone who’s interested, the transgression is often forgiven.

World Dating Partners, an 11-year-old service based in the U.K.that claims 6.5 million active profiles, makes sure each message appears as if the sender is registered on the same site as the user. “We’ve got large sites in our system,” Mark Edwards, sales director for World Dating Partners, told Betabeat, although he declined to name any clients. “We have a very strict policy, like a doctor-patient relationship.”

Companies that own many dating sites also share profiles across their networks; for example, profiles from HornyMatches.com might be shown to people on LonelyWivesAffairs.com, both of which are owned by PimpMansion.com.

The photo sold with Mr. Siddiqui's profile. It is not him.

Beyond the cold database problem and its problematic solutions, scammers remain an issue on online dating sites. Fraudsters living in Eastern Europe put up thousands of fake profiles for girls who claim to need money for a visa, Mr. Evans said. “You can always tell a fake Eastern bloc profile,” Mr. Evans said. “The 22-year-old girl who looks like she’s 14, and she’s got her boobs out and she’s squished them together with her elbows... ‘I would like to be meeting you.’ The minute you see that fractured English you know. But people don’t see that, because dating sites sell hope.”

A few years ago, he realized a curious thing that bodes poorly for anyone who hopes to find true love online. “Guys will pay $25 a month just to flirt with people on the Internet even if they are fake,” he said. “Millions of men spend money just to flirt with women that they know they’re never going to meet.”

Mr. Siddiqui's real photo.

For the online daters who wrote back to Betabeat, the hazards come with the territory. “When a profile is written in fluent English and I receive messages that are grammatically poor, then I get suspicious,” Saleem Siddiqui, a 42-year-old Londoner, said in an email. “Also, many of the ‘fake’ members say they live in the UK but never use British spelling (e.g. colour instead of color). However, I haven’t experienced anyone trying to extort money from me in recent years.”

Alex Furmansky, a Ukranian-born New Yorker who graduated magna cum laude from Wharton in 2007, has wanted to start a dating site since college. He quit his job last year to start Sparkology, a members-only dating site for educated young professionals, in order to avoid the kind of skeezy cruising he’d observed on sites with huge databases. Mr. Furmansky became increasingly disillusioned with online dating as he learned more about it. Hoping to get Sparkology on one of the many sites that claim to objectively rate dating services, he realized most of the reviewers wanted him to pay to play. When he asked for a candid review, he was told “it would be easier” if he had an affiliate linking program so the review site could collect a commission for referring customers.

Mr. Furmansky was further scandalized by a pitch from SaleDatingProfiles offering to sell profiles. “When we got that email, I yelled at my colleagues for even showing it to me because I didn’t want a trace of it in my inbox,” he said. “It was like a slap in the face, like, ‘is this really how it works?’”

SaleDatingProfiles is based in Israel and Russia, a representative told Betabeat over Skype, and operates 150 dating sites of its own, which she declined to name. SaleDatingProfiles says its profiles come from users who signed up for a dating site in its network. New customers must agree to terms of service that include a clause: “The Company has the right to exchange the profiles of Members with other Dating Websites in order to help our Members to find perfect marches [sic]. Also this will give them more wide choice.”

BuyProfiles.com did not respond to a request for comment. But a representative for DatingProfilesSale.com corresponded with Betabeat by email. Six years ago, he tried to build his own dating site, he said. “Nobody can start dating business without profiles,” he wrote. “People come only to dating sites where [there] are many other people.” He found a Ukrainian website that had left its profiles and email addresses exposed and copied about 100,000 profiles. Next he offered his 100,000 profiles to World Dating Partners in exchange for 100,000 additional profiles and built up the business from there. (World Dating Partners says it does not trade profiles with other sites, but acknowledged that it recently changed ownership so it’s possible such a thing happened in the past.)

DatingProfilesSale.com now has a number of large customers, he said, but he would not reveal which ones. “Yes, it’s big sites like eHarmony, but Internet companies basically keep in secret how they run [their] business. If I tell you their secrets, then they will be mad [at] me,” he wrote. “I have hundreds [of] satisfied customers but I am not sure if they want popularize [that] they buy profiles from me.”

Badoo, Match.com, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish and Spark Networks, which owns Spark.com, JDate and ChristianMingle, expressly denied buying or selling profiles. “We are dedicated to building safe, secure and authentic online communities that help strengthen the various communities we serve, and buying or selling profiles does not align with this mission,” a representative for Spark said in an email. EHarmony did not respond to a request for comment.

In general, it’s mostly small players that buy profiles, Mr. Evans said. “It’s these latecomers, like people still trying to start dating sites,” he said. “Like, oh my God, don’t you have anything better to do?”

“If you just go on some of the sketchier dating sites on the web, you start to have this experience of ‘Are these people real? What’s going on here?’” said Aaron Schildkrout, who co-founded the New York–based dating startup HowAboutWe and coined “black hat dating.” The bad actors hurt the industry, he said. “At the same time, it allows more authentic experiences like the one we’re trying to create to stand out and be a breath of fresh air in a sort of tundra of iniquity.”

Mark Brooks, a consultant and publicist who works exclusively with Internet dating companies, said he once fired a client for buying profiles. “When people have a bad experience on any Internet dating site, they just label it ‘Internet dating. ‘Internet dating sucks!’” he told Betabeat. “I don’t work with anybody who’s bad for the industry because in ten years time I won’t be working with anybody, because there won’t be an industry.”

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of March 28, 2012.

Mr. Schildkrout. (Photo: Kathryn Tucker)

Aaron Schildkrout is the co-founder and co-CEO of HowAboutWe.com—a dating site that's all about actually getting offline on real dates. Yesterday he got word of the first HowAboutWe wedding.

Adrianne Jeffries of Betabeat pinged me yesterday with a link to a post from Philip Greenspun titled, "Is this continued existence of involuntarily single people proof that online dating is a failure?"

STC (Save the Click): Here's a summary of Greenspun's piece: He argues that, given the falling rates of marriage over the past few decades and the continued plethora of single people who want to be married, online dating is a de facto failure. He believes that self-description in online dating should be abandoned for more of a peer-testimony system. His evidence is some census data about marriage rates and the success of a lengthy testimony he wrote on behalf of a now-married friend. The whole thing is framed in opposition to the claims of a pro-online-dating "26-year-old" guy who Greenspun met at a Hanukkah Party ("suspiciously held on Christmas Eve").

To reframe his questionable argument as a question: Given 1) people's desire to find true love and a wonderful life partner; 2) the near-ubiquity of internet access in the U.S.; and 3) the existence of dozens (actually thousands) of online dating sites—why are so many Susans (and Jims) still desperately seeking?

Simply put: It’s terribly challenging to find the love of your life.

Check out the ecstatic German poet Rilke on the topic:

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

And I believe this is becoming increasingly difficult.

Imagine two curves.

The first: Time versus marriage rates. This curve arcs downwards over time—at least over the last few decades (according to Greenspun’s research).

The second: Time versus the Ease of Finding and Sustaining True Love (or even good-enough-love). This curve, I think, would be curving downward even more steeply than the marriage rate.

If you buy this math—then what accounts for the difference in steepness? I’d venture that at least one cause is online dating.

More broadly, I’d say that contrary to the tremendous historical forces driving marriage and love-finding rates down (transformations in employment patterns, gender dynamics, mass entitlement, the decline of men, post-industrial depletion, etc.—that’s for another post) is millennialism—the internet-driven, global, connected, do-it-yourself, change-oriented, active, healthy, actualist movement that is also upon us.

Internet dating was born of this 21st century spirit. Accordingly, the best sites are fairly effective at helping the most highly motivated ring-seekers find a match—and therefore account for some of the differential between the two curves we drew a minute ago.

Sadly though, most internet dating sites have failed to stay true to millenialism. They embody much of the stagnant, non-doership that millennialism opposes. Endless online chatting. Fake hope couched in “scientific” matchmaking. Browsing and browsing and browsing people like so many boxes of cereal.

But that’s not all internet dating can be —or will be. So, in a sense, Greenspun is intuitively right that internet dating isn’t there yet. It isn’t millennial enough yet.

Chemistry—the recognition that occurs between two people that they could each imagine a wonderful life in the other’s arms—this kind of chemistry happens offline.

My hope is that as more and more people embrace the internet’s power to create magic in the real world, the curve that maps the ease of finding and sustaining true love will lift upwards.

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.

"Sultry lounge" Madam Geneva.

Remember Taildaters, the MTV show that followed two people on a date as their friends talked smack and sent them text messages from a "control room"? Local dating start-up HowAboutWe does, and the action-based dating start-up is bringin' it back by asking, "How about we do some oversharing?"

The plan is to watch a young, attractive couple on their first date tonight over cocktails and pork buns at Noho speakeasy Madam Geneva via a live date cam. Based on HAW's blog, the proposal must have read something like, "How about we go to a sultry lounge replete with dark corners and plush booths, which, along with the out-of-this-world cocktails, make it an ideal location to meet someone for a date?" (And put it on the internet?)

James, 23, and Stephanie, 21, have agreed (hopefully) to stage their date in front of a webcam that will be Livestreaming here at 8 p.m. so others can watch "how real people act on real dates." The best part? People on the internet can chat about the couple and "size-up their date as they size-up one another (and we get the anonymous veil of the Internet!)," HowAboutWe says. They'll be participating, of course.