Cloning Platial

Found this solicitation for a coder to clone Platial for the Japanese market.
What a strange feeling it is to see this kind of thing.

Here is a snippet of the solicitation.

[Description]

This site is full cloning platial.com

Please study platial.com deeply before you bid.

[language]
this site will be for Japanese site. People use site and search in Japanese
We will translate from English to Japanese by ourselves, so you just need to make English site.

(but you need to direct me where and how I can change character. please comment on the code )

[Design Front end]

we want to use ajax as much as possible.

Platial.com

[administration part]

Need advise for additional function for admin part from Winner of this project.

[User part]

We need to have same functions as platial with additional feature
We want to use ajax as much as possible.

[deadline]

deadline will be 30days after this project awarded.

Once this site is developed, you will need to relinquish all rights to every aspect of it. You CANNOT put it on your portfolio

The chosen bidder MUST be on MSN,or Skype DAILY. I will expect DAILY updates as well as links to previews every step along the way. Don't bother bidding if you can't meet these requirements.

In the same week, we also saw the emergence of another actual semi clone as well, this one from China (cloned css class names and all).

I remember when Scott Heiferman's Meetup.com started getting cloned, we talked a lot about it. We ended up agreeing that the best response is to consider the clone a free, remotely based R&D lab. In fact, many great UI improvements were able to be gleened for Meetup, I guess it's our turn to start window shopping for features on this and the soon to be seen additional clones.

Comments

[Scootdown]

Well, it's funny to see that clone in China, the EEmap project. Because if they're using google maps for China, then they're not having too much fun. Where we pick specific edges of street corners to mark what we find, they're lmited to like, cities as a whole... There are no real street maps for the country and the satellite imagery is not allowed for zooming in up close. Not too exciting. The Japanese Maps are a different story. I heard once that 'imitation is a high form of flattery,' but I'd keep tabs on these guys anyways.