Mr. Chau.

This morning Betabeat learned that Rolling.fm co-founder and former Googler Tim Zhou had joined Tumblr. It has also come to light that another Rolling cofounder and Xoogler, Thomas Chau, has joined another prominent New York startup: Squarespace. "We liked Thomas's strong entrepreneurial spirit (take risks and run fast) along with his perfect Squarespace DNA of product design sensibility coupled with engineering awesomeness," Squarespace SVP Jesse Hertzberg wrote in an email. Squarespace, if you're not familiar, is a website builder and hosting platform (that is often likened to Tumblr, as it happens) founded in 2003. Now we just need to suss out what has become of the third Rolling co-founder, Xoogler Nhon Ma...

Mr. Zhou.

Wondering what happened to Turntable.fm's fast following, Xoogler-founded cousin, Rolling.fm? The social music site has been serving up errors for about two weeks; Tenka, the founders' previous startup, is also gone. Co-founder and chief product officer Tim Zhou, whose resume includes IBM and Google, did not respond to a request for comment by email, and now we know why.

It looks like Tumblr recently nabbed itself an Xoogler. Mr. Zhou created a Tumblr about one month ago and is now listed on the startup's staff page alongside 68 other employees (Tumblr, you're getting so big!)

We reached out to Mr. Zhou again this morning for comment. Our speculation? Rolling, a drastic pivot from deals provider Tenka, failed to raise money after being posted on AngelList (perhaps in part because no one wanted to compete against the golden child, Turntable).

Tumblr, meanwhile, is still hiring for eight open engineering positions as well as for Dutch and Swedish speaking ambassadors.

Indeed, Rolling.fm does not resolve and the last tweet was on November 19. Rolling's precursor, a social deals site called Tenka.com, is also not resolving.

The Facebook app had about 200 daily active users a month ago; now it has none, according to AppData. There's evidence that Rolling was active until at least Dec. 15, when the producer duo Dada Life premiered a remix there; Bnet interviewed the startup on Dec. 8.

Tim Zhou, Rolling's chief product officer, did not respond to an email request for comment. At present, the mysterious disappearance of Rolling.fm would appear to be due to three possible reasons:

1. Forgot to renew domain*
2. Cease and desist notice from scary record label
3. Failed to gain enough traction or funding, cofounders gave up on it (even Turntable's traffic has been slipping)

*A reader points out that the domain expires in 2012, so this explanation is unlikely.

Rolling.fm caught some flak from the internet when it launched in the wake of Turntable.fm's extreme success. The founders admitted they duped the idea, but appealed to the internet's tradition of innovation. (Even Steve Jobs subscribed to the doctrine of "good artists copy, great artists steal.")

The cofounders had pivoted from Tenka, a deals site that raised from seed investors including StubHub's Jeff Fluhr, Great Oaks Venture Capital's Ben Lin and Raj Sandhu, formerly of the Soros Fund. The site was available outside the U.S., unlike Turntable, which let them grab some easy users.

The cofounders switched to building Rolling in May, they said, which would mean Rolling had about a seven month run before giving up the ghost. But the co-founders put the startup on AngelList about nine months ago. We'll update as we learn more.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/)

ROLLING ALONG. "We are excited to announce there has been over 1,000,000 friendships made on Rolling.FM since our launch a little over a month ago!  Our platform has definitely become the music AND social discovery platform," writes cofounder Nhon Ma in an email. Rolling is launching more social features--like "buy a drink," whereby which users will be able to buy old and new friends "drinks," and the enhanced profile browser to "view others' playlist, photos, etc."

I LAUNCHED DIS. Meet Tinyproj, an experiment from the prolific Kyle Bragger. "Hello. Tinyproj connects talented developers, designers, illustrators, and copywriters with folks who need a hand with paid, short-term* projects."

IGNITE IT AGAIN. "Ignite NYC's on 10/10. We will be announcing speakers this week. We have a room of 1,600 to fill, the largest evaaarrr!"

THRILLIST IS SERIOUSLY HIRING. Seriously. Positions include Advertising Product Manager, VP of Business Development, Senior Buyer - Men's Accessories, Marketing Coordinator, Junior Recruiter, PHP Developer(s) and Director of Merchandising.

FOURSQUARE PUSHING PUSH API TODAY. Will they make it now that the heat is on? Stay tuned!

MOMS. CafeMom is now Mom.com, and hiring a PHP developer.

POSICORE PARTIES. Friday, New Work City with the Turntable.fms, three years, celebrate. "One year in our amazing new space. Three years of doing awesome things together. Hundreds of events hosted. Thousands of coworkers served. And we’re just getting started. Join us as we celebrate the past and chart the future. We’re changing the world, and we’re doing it together. Just like we always have. This event is a free event open to all."

And, a Wordpress party is an Automattic party. "Ranaan and Paul from WP.com VIP buying drinks for you in NYC." Tomorrow night. Midtown.

BEST OF THE EMAIL PRESS RELEASE FACTORY: "Call for Entries for the 16^thAnnual Webby Awards is now open! Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webbys celebrates the year’s best websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile and apps. The early entry deadline for is October 28, 2011. Nominees will be announced in April 2012, and the hallmark Webby ceremony will be held in Spring 2012."

StartUp Health. "To date, more than 650 entrepreneurs, investors, corporations and organizations have joined the movement and taken The StartUp Health Pledge to support the ecosystem; more than 100 entrepreneurs have applied to participate in the StartUp Health Academy and already more than 50 startups have attended office hours receiving StartUp Health mentorship."

Manilla, "the free personal account management service, unveiled today its first edition of mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms, providing customers with another element of convenience to stay organized. Manilla has also added new accounts including Netflix and popular daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to provide customers with the option to track entertainment subscriptions and time-sensitive coupons."

New York’s BuyWithMe "appointed Gerry McGoldrick to the position of CMO, only weeks after appointing new CPO Charlie Gray.  A former GSI (a division of eBay) SVP of Marketing, McGoldrick’s focus in the new position will be on marketing initiatives directed to further accelerate the growth of BuyWithMe’s customer base.  Additionally, McGoldrick plans on developing strategies to perfect BuyWithMe’s brand message to partnering merchants, as the only merchant-centric daily deal site.  McGoldrick’s appointment is yet more evidence of BuyWithMe’s continuing momentum in the daily deals industry."

AFTER GROUPON. "Harvard MBA friends Stuart Wall and John Buchanan launched Postabon in Dec. 2009 as a website to tell other New Yorkers where to find the best deals, sample sales and food & drink specials in NYC.  Once Groupon and its many clones had entered, they decided to shift gears and fulfill a need in the industry that was ignored. Enter Signpost."

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.

Users felt a sense of deja-vu when Rolling.fm, an interactive music streaming start-up, launched just over a week ago. Rolling.fm's interface--a virtual club with DJs lined up at a laptop and a floating chat room--looks so much like viral hit Turntable.fm that users, along with Betabeat's own numero uno Turntable fanboy, @benpopper, immediately started calling it a knock-off and questioning its legitimacy. (One Betabeat tipster claimed the app, which has 2,400 daily average users according to the most recent numbers from AppData, is populated by fake avatars).

Rolling is hardly the first pop-up app inspired by Turntable.fm's innovation and success. But the app, made by the three ex-Google co-founders of the daily deals / social media advertising start-up Tenka, features all the Turntable calling cards: avatars of DJs and listeners, rotating DJ spots, and a "weak-hot" rating system that can get DJs points or get a song skipped.

After some initial dodginess about where the idea came from, Rolling.fm's founders are ready to own- up to their origins. "I think it's obvious that the initial version of Rolling is inspired by Turntable," co-founder Tim Zhou said in an email. "To say otherwise is not accurate. We started working on our pivot in late May."

Back in early spring, Mr. Zhou and two fellow Xooglers were working on the daily deals / social media advertising start-up Tenka, which is now on standby. They started working on ideas for a graphical interface resembling early adventure games ("You see a cupcake"), at least one of which featured a central element of Turntable. Betabeat took a look at some early mock-ups, but Rolling's counsel has advised them against publishing their records.

So the team was losing steam on Tenka and brainstorming pivots when they saw Turntable.fm. The vision clicked and they had an app up in about half the time it took the trio behind StickyBits to build Turntable.

"We ultimately have different product visions for this thing," Mr. Zhou said. Rolling has already rolled out a nifty new feature--a virtual "restroom" where users can DJ, chat and spraypaint graffiti on the walls.

Other differences between Rolling.fm and Turntable include:

• Turntable.fm is restricted to users in the U.S., while Rolling.fm is still available internationally. That and a targeted marketing effort directed at universities may be why Rolling.fm, despite being buggier and much less slick, has already seen an impressive peak of 8,500 daily users last week, according to AppData, although the site is much quieter today. Turntable has around 21,000 daily average users.
• Where Turntable had a rise of company rooms, the majority of rooms on Rolling.fm are alma mater-specific. And despite hearing criticism that the site appeared populated but was actually dead, Betabeat found some highly-active rooms where conversation was tripping along at the same coked-out speed you see in, say, the Coding Soundtrack room on Turntable.
• DJ points. One frequent criticism of Turntable is that DJs dominate a room and never let anyone else play. But on Rolling, DJs get nicked points when users vote against their tracks--making the DJ rankings a lot more volatile and lowering the barrier to entry for new DJs.
• Little things: Rolling lets users buy virtual goods with DJ credits in the form of little pieces of flair--crowns and bling for your avatar; you can also privately message individual users whereas Turntable is restricted to the room's group chat.
• And features yet to come. "We will be releasing additional room formats like DJ battles soon," Mr. Zhou said.

Start-ups tend to spring up in crowds, as we've seen with the recent spate of group buying and group texting. In the interactive music space, there's Console.fm, based out of the 500Startups incubator in Mountain View and built in three days, which appeals to the anti-social social music streamers who want the freedom to set it and forget it, knowing that whatever playlist they've chosen has been vetted by users on SoundCloud and it's easy to skip if a beat is not to one's liking. There's Outloud.fm, based in New York, which rose up around the same time as Turntable in early April and provides much of Turntable's "everyone's a DJ!" functionality, just without the cute graphics. And the precursor, Listening Room, possibly the Ur-app of this crop of interactive, socially-informed streaming music start-ups.

When asked what Turntable thought of Rolling.fm, co-founder Billy Chasen said, "We are still waiting until we are out of private beta until we talk and give interviews / comments.  Right now we're just focused on scaling our own product and making it better for public beta." May the best app win.

MIXED MESSAGES. A couple weeks ago, Betabeat noticed that Skillshare founder Mike Karnjanaprakorn was out in San Francisco for the launch of Skillshare in that city. Had he picked up some cash while he was out there, we wondered? Skillshare raised $550,000 in January, which was made public in May, so the company certainly could have sustained its five employees on that--especially with MK's militant lean start-up mindset and the bit of cash it's getting from the website. So when Mr. Karnj said he hadn't raised a new round, we said 'Oh okay.' But then we kept hearing, over the transom, that Skillshare has raised a fresh round. And they're trying to fill up their sweet Soho office with a backend developer, community team and founder apprentice. Any insights? Drop us a tip.

#UNDERSHARING. "Now that I'm forced to use new Twitter I will be using Twitter much less," declared Hashable CEO and Betabeat frenemy Mike Yavonditte, known for purveying plethoras of pithy proclamations in the form of #tweets. RIP, a source intimated sarcastically, he will be missed! But it appears Mr. Yavonditte has gotten acclimated to his new environs: 15 tweets today.

A/S/L. Michael Galpert's iPhone decided to go from being jailbroken to just broken, pulling a factory reset in the middle of updating to iTunes, and the Aviary CEO co-founder no longer had anyone's number the night of his big party. Hilarity ensues! "Not having anyone's numbers in my phone is turning out to be the best game evar," he said on Twttr, to which Barbarian Group's Colin James Nagy replied, "Everyone prank Galpert!"

Q AND NOT U. In the course of Aol's attempts to hip-ify, Aol Ventures's Q Labs has become a super-cushy gig. Hackers reportedly get high salaries and excellent terms--"six figures and 20 percent equity, or something like that"--says our source, to hack on projects in a gorgeous space at AOL Ventures in Noho/East Village. Caveat: We hear the wifi sucks, and incubate-ees have to work off Verizon MiFis. Got a Q Labs story? Email us!