Followware | Hacker News Reader

Followware

dribbble.com

18 pointslatitude16 comments

Seems counter-productive to copyright the term or want some exclusivity to it. If you want the term to be known and understood, let others denote their service in the same way.

Did anyone copyright the term shareware?

Maybe he's provoking people to spite him by using it.

I don't think he was actually serious about copyrighting the term. I believe he was just using it as a figure of speech.

It just occurred to me that a free service of notable popularity can be capitalized on, and without resorting to ads.

You use the service - you follow me on Twitter/Facebook/elsewhere. You get the service, and I get an ear to promote my other projects.

Have anyone tried this before?

It seems like a kinder version of the tweet/like to download which is pretty popular for music marketers.

I use the method on http://www.twitterdoctors.net/ and more than 70% of my followers are now doctors, which is useful for the occasions I do tweet about new features and stuff related to my healthcare start-up.

For those interested, I am in the process of re-writing the site (dev version at http://www.twitterdoctors.com/) – to automate the process, try the wizard out, it uses twitter's new event listeners.

Your site violates Twitter's trademark. You need a different name...

I'm (thankfully) out of date on Facebook marketing tactics, but gating content behind Likes and Invited Friend Counts is standard - there are even plenty of sweepstakes to win just for consenting to being shown a like button. Generally speaking, the content behind these gates is a single payoff - a little nibble of digital content. Companies love that trade for ears to promote content to, "like" being a friendly euphemism for "subscribe" and all.

I'm sure it's been tried, but it might be interesting to check Like/Follow persistence in exchange for long-term access to content and services. "Have a twitter account following ours? You're in!"

These guys have: http://everytimezone.com/ Awesome service, the only "ad" is for their other product, which is not free.

Likeware - like it to use it.

Tweetware - tweet about it to use.

Referware - refer friends emails to use the app.

Reviewware - write an app store review to upgrade to pro version of the app.

And so on....

You 'claim copyright', eh?

http://ask.yahoo.com/20041213.html

I guess he technically could patent the concept (IANAL though).

It was a joke.

I seriously hope that the author was being purposefully ironic/trolling. You can't copyright a word. It would fall well short of the de minimis, even if it was totally made up.

The only case I can think of off of the top of my head would be Exxon, where they tried to copyright Exxon, because if my memory serves me correctly they failed to secure their TM correctly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Corp._v_Exxon_Insurance_C...

As others have mentioned, perhaps I'm just taking him too seriously and he was just using it as a figure of speech. However, on the internet, he really should be as verbose as possible... and not make poor jokes like that.

This reminds me of 'I DECLARE BANKRUPCCYYYY'

Came here to say the same thing. Here it is for those who missed it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuGIgf-ICHM

Reply on news.ycombinator.com