If its any consolation, Google announced plans to emulate a lot of the functionality planned for our new email client, Litepost, days after we started announcin

If its any consolation, Google announced plans to emulate a lot of the functionality planned for our new email client, Litepost, days after we started announcing and exploring our ideas with the public and users: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest I'm not saying they ripped us of course (who could possibly prove that?) but I will say that the timing is awfully coincidental, given that the overall ideas behind our program have been in development for almost a year (and we just started publicizing our ideas recently)! Personally I take it as a compliment, and am grateful/flattered to have such a large competitor emulating plans we've had in development for a while. (The main thing we heard while pursuing this idea was "How can you possibly improve upon Gmail?" Well now Gmail itself recommends recommendations upon its service.) All this, however, corresponds directly to what PG says and some of you echo below: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html 8. Slowness in Launching (I'm new to this whole arena, so it's taken us a while to a) find the right developers and b) get up to speed before launch.) If anyone's interested in weighing in, I wonder if open sourcing our project might help it or be of general interest/utility... is anyone interested in "an Open Source Alternative to Gmail that You Can Install and Run on Your Own Servers"? If so, I could use some help. I am actually interested in ultimately duplicating _and open sourcing_ a lot of the functionality of Google generally, in order to decentralize it (the operation and its power, which after all is only algorithms + horsepower) and nullify the negative privacy implications of Google. What do you think? Any takers? I think the only possible contender to Google is an open source alternative. Let's Open Source Google! PS From another news.YC article: "In Silicon Valley, Google-as-the-giant talk is deafening. As others have noted, startups used to get the question "What are you going to do when Microsoft does this?" and today, it's "What are you going to do about Google?" Source: http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/04/google_a_tale_o.html http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/04/google_a_tale_o.html