He's attacking Amy Hoy, a vocal opponent[1] of the hype around startups whose current business is a time-tracking app called Freckle. Freckle's main attraction is that it has a pleasant user interface. I'm not sure how anyone was duped. I guess it's supposed to be dishonest if you're getting people to pay money for functionality they can get free elsewhere.
Yeah, that was pretty nasty swipe. Exactly what the article kind of gets at: big shot dismissing with a sniff -- he's "disappointed" with us -- something that's a very nice goal for the little people. There are hordes of people making 6 or 7 figures online that are "duping" people worse than Amy Hoy -- who is duping people none at all.
Yes. In the interest of preserving history, he wrote and later deleted a line that went like:
"duping credulous customers into paying for [something something] time tracking styled with the latest CSS design site trends"
I was not directly named, but if you ask me, it's pretty clear which app he's talking about: my first, Freckle http://letsfreckle.com .
And yup, that's me! I dupe 1,000 paying customers every month! They're so well-duped that they write love letters to our support account. I really can't get over the fact that I've got them so well-fooled they actually believe my software makes them happier and helps them run a better, more profitable business.
For the record, though, we have lots of functionality you can't get elsewhere. That's part of the magic of the dupe.
EDIT: Hey, look like that line about duping is back in Alex's comment. Either I'm blind and didn't see it the last time (which I concede is possible)… or it returned.
Also seems childish of al3x to forget that out of amy hoy and thomas fuchs' work came scriptaculous which has probably inspired startup founders wowed by Ajax only less than Ruby on Rails itself. al3x probably leveraged that work early on at Twitter itself.
If lifestyle businesses like 37signals and freckle are producing the kind of tools like RoR and scriptaculous, more power to them!
[1]: http://unicornfree.com/2011/follow-the-money/