Cuil steals the favicon from Identi.ca

Posted July 29th, 2008 by unitone

Cuil.com rips off Identi.ca's favicon.

In all aspects of today's life, image is the most crucial attribute for survival. We rely on visual cues from our environment to guide our actions. Familiar symbols get imprinted in our subconscious and become a important factor in decision making.

We get bombarded with more and more images everyday. New discoveries and technologies are creating even more ways for displaying images.

From a marketing point of view, it is not easy to be seen in this visual madness. Using the right symbols is often more important than the substance of what is being sold.

A brand refers to the name, logo, slogan, and design style chosen to represent a product, a service, a company, or even a person. Consumer reaction to a brand, such as brand recognition, is built by accumulating user experience with the product, service, or company represented by the brand. In this process, a brand becomes the symbol which embodies everything about a company, product or service.

What happens when a symbol is too similar to another? When two brands are too similar, brand recognition suffers, business suffers, and consumers may not be getting the right message and miss out on a good experience. In the business world, with copyright and trademark laws, this usually ends up in a conflict.

I have started to use Identi.ca a few weeks ago and got enamored with the micro-blog web service and with the Open Source framework. I even posted an entry about it in the Vedetta micro-blog (http://www.vedetta.com/unitone-said-91). As with any other web site, i rely on favicon to locate it in my bookmarks and in my web browser tabs.

Yesterday, like everybody else, I went to browse Cuil, the new search engine (my post about Cuil: http://www.vedetta.com/unitone-said-231). I obviously bookmarked it for reference. This morning, while drinking a beer on the beach, I experienced something weird. In Firefox history I clicked on the Identi.ca favicon and I ended up on Cuil. My brain paused for a second in complete confusion. What happened? Am I getting sloppy? Maybe I was distracted by the bright colored bikini on the girl that just passed by.

It was none of the above. The Cuil favicon is almost the same as the Identi.ca favicon. The shapes and the color schemes are very similar.

Favicon is part of a brand. Web surfers use it for navigating their bookmarks and tabs.

Creating a symbol from basic shapes is risky, if you are building a brand. Anyone can duplicate unintentionally, and it gets hard to trademark and copyright.

Finding the right symbol is hard. As a parallel, Google went through a whole scientific process to come up with their new Google Search favicon (my post about it: http://www.vedetta.com/unitone-said-83).

I don't believe Cuil stole the favicon from Identi.ca and it is probably a coincidence.
Mistakes were made. And I corrected them by using my custom favicon for Cuil in my bookmarks. Now I can go back to not having to think too hard when clicking in my own link list.

Could this happen to you?
Identi.ca favicon: http://identi.ca/favicon.ico
Cuil.com favicon: http://www.cuil.com/favicon.ico