Flickr and Bababian – Seperated at birth?

Ripping site design, site structure or even a full site is nothing new to the internet. I recently heard of a China based photo sharing service named Bababian and how similar it was to flickr. Being an avid flickr user I decided to give it a try and boy was I surprised.

This site was so similar to flickr that it was ridiculous. Not only that most of their features matched word per word and pixel per pixel with flickr.

A quick look at the whois of both sites revealed that bababian has been up since 2005, which is about 2 years after flickr was launched.

So what were some of the similarities?

• The upload system (graphics and all)
• Site color scheme
• Photo Options (add a note, blog this, all sizes, rotate etc.)
• Photostream option
• Additional Information area
• Signup e-mails and flickr mail
• Favourite’s Function
• Flickr Uploadr (They even name their’s Uploadr)
• Photo Rss and Atom Feeds
• Groups
• Flickr Organizer

Those are just a few that I found, there are probably many more similarities I could not find because I don’t understand chinese. Another funny thing I found was that they only offered half the upload limit that flickr has and no pro account (well I could not find a page that offers pro accounts).

In my opinion, bababian is a shabby rip of the original Flickr.com. They have tried and rip every possible feature in flickr to the max, maybe thats what took 2 years to launch the site after flickr was up.

Visit Bababian and see for yourself. Don’t understand chinese? Use babel fish.