Lamebook Lawsuit

Facebook's frenemy: The founders of Lamebook on freedom of speech and popularparodies

When The Social Network claimed three Oscars last spring for its cutthroat depictions of Facebook’s legal strategy, it’s not hard to imagine how aggressive the company has been in pursuing copyrights for “face” and “book” and suing any website (see teachbook.com) that uses them in vain.

But lamebook.com—an Austin-based, college-favorite parody site that lets visitors post their “friends" most absurd, real conversations—ended their scuffle over infringement a couple of weeks ago, when Facebook’s efforts to relocate the legal battle from Austin to Palo Alto, California were shot down by a Texas federal judge. Unlike most Facebook lookalikes, Lamebook is an explicit spoof and could defend itself in court by proving there was no way to confuse the two brands.

Lamebook's survival marks the longevity of the reality-based Internet humor mythos, where sites like textsfromlastnight.com and damnyouautocorrect.com expose truths so unbelievable they parody themselves. We got the chance to chat with Lamebook’s Jonathan Standefer and Matthew Genitempo over some fried okra about their experience of escaping the clutches of the social networking giant.

CultureMap: From the inception of the parody site, didn’t you expect that Facebook would take a bit of offense to your laughing at its users' expense?

Matthew Genitempo: Well, we never thought that we were going to be contacted by Facebook. We operated a website for a year before we did. We had friends who worked at Facebook in California, so when our website kind of took off, there’d be company-wide emails with Lamebook submissions in them. Like, "Hey, check this guy out. It’s really funny." So we thought we were in the clear.

Jonathan Standefer: Yeah, we knew we were on their radar. But [one day] I went out to get fast food or something, and my phone rings from this random number that said, “Hello, this is so-and-so from Facebook’s legal counsel.”

CM: A lot of people assume that Facebook opened suit on you, but didn’t they step on your toes first?

MG: Yeah, that was right after all the news hits started going down. We had done a bunch of interviews for NBC and FOX. And then one day, [Facebook] threatened to take down our Fan Page, so they did that. We had 85,000 followers on there, which is a really good way to communicate to people.

JS: When that’s taken away, that’s a really big blow to the traffic because people forget about it sometimes unless it’s in their newsfeed.

MG: And then it was funny, because someone tried to type in “Lamebook,” but we couldn’t type “Lamebook” on Facebook anymore. Not in statuses or chats or anywhere. You could say any curse word you wanted to on Facebook, but you couldn’t say “Lamebook.” I think we had pissed them off pretty bad. That went on for about a day, and TechCrunch did an article on it—talking about free speech.

SNL will rip somebody off exactly, and nobody cares. It’s fine, everybody has a good time. But Facebook doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor about it.

CM: That’s a really scary thing to do, completely omit a word from people’s vocabulary.

MG: Exactly, yeah! Everybody freaked out. I think they got quite a few emails. The next day, they turned it back on.

JS: Yeah, they said it was a “technological error” or something.

MG: I forgot about how big a deal that was. We were freaking out… it was weird. Then they gave us a warning to change our name or else “we’re going to sue you."

JS: It was really hard, because we had such a large following by then. We were afraid if we changed our name, we’d lose a lot of the readers because they’d get confused. So we registered Lameblog.com, and we were really going to change it. We started building the site.

MG: We just decided that we wanted to keep the name, and the proper step to that was to file declaratory judgment. So we actually sued them first just to bring it to a court and say, “We’re a parody, we can use this name.” And then come Monday or Tuesday the following week, Facebook counter-sued.

CM: Do you think it was scarier being sued by Facebook, who had a movie about suing people?

MG: I’ve never been married, but I think being sued by an ex-wife would be pretty scary too.

JS: Yeah, it was really funny, ‘cause the guy who served us didn’t know. He knocked on our door and said, “You’re being served by… Facebook.” And then he just handed me this huge packet and walked off. It was really intimidating.

CM: Do you see yourselves as the victors? A lot of news outlets are touting it as “David beats Goliath."

MG: No, we’re happy. I don’t know if I see myself as the winner. We can’t really say who the winner is.

JS: Yeah, it’s a settlement. I’m happy with it.

MG: I think Facebook’s kind of happy with it too. Everyone wins, everyone looses. Nobody gets exactly what they wanted.

JS: They’ve agreed to continue letting us run the site, and we agreed not to trademark the name “Lamebook." We had originally thought about trademarking that name, but we’re just not going to do that now.

CM: So, how are your lives after this?

MG: It’s that thing you think about… I thought about it every ten minutes. Because I don’t really know too much about litigation, but I always had this fear that I was going to wake up one day, and it was going to be like, “Yeah, you lost. Take down your website, and your company’s over.” You don’t really know.

JS: Especially when your company’s in jeopardy like that. And if it were just a joke site—like it was when we started—it wouldn’t be a big deal. But since then, this is our job.

MG: Yeah, we make a living off this. It’s opened up a ton of new doors for us to do new and better things. It’s scary, because you kind of wish that Facebook would have taken that into account. That was a really big annoyance to me; it seems like Facebook’s a really well-off company, you think about how much they’re worth and they can’t be stopped, and we’re just two dudes in Austin trying to make a living and have a good time. The annoyance factor was like, “Lay off.”

I think people go to Facebook specifically looking for things to submit to Lamebook, so it’s just extra hits that they’re getting.

CM: Yeah, your site isn’t playing off of Facebook specifically, it’s all about the users.

JS: Yeah, we like Facebook.

MG: I’m on Facebook like 20 times a day, and it’s such a necessary part of my friends, I have to use Facebook. If anything, I think that Lamebook helps Facebook.

JS: I think people go to Facebook specifically looking for things to submit to Lamebook, so it’s just extra hits that they’re getting.

CM: Do you think you guys have set an expectation for how far a parody site can go before it’s considered infringement?

JS: I mean, Facebook is just different than any other site. When all of this was going on, we kept talking about the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live. I mean, SNL will rip somebody off exactly, and nobody cares. It’s fine, everybody has a good time. But Facebook doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor about it.

CM: Has the site drawn in more traffic because of your legal attention?

MG: Yeah, not as much as we thought it would.

JS: I think everybody’s pretty much aware of it already. Everybody who pays attention to the web world has already heard about the initial suit. I got a Twitter message from somebody the other day, some company with “Wordbook” in it who wants to talk to us….

MG: They’re suing everybody. There’s just so many, I think we could definitely gain some new readers from it, but the traffic didn’t like quadruple or night everything.

JS: Since it’s been a settlement, we’ve been pretty quiet.

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To celebrate Lamebook’s local victory with a kick of irony, you can “like” Lamebook on Facebook to revel in the 750,000+ million people (including you!) who get online to talk about—what else—themselves each day.

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an app for that

Texas entrepreneur creates AI-powered app for healthy cooking tweaks

Photo via abettermeal.com

The app mostly focuses on adjusting recipes for things like heart health and allergies.

After many years of living to eat, a large swath of American society is now facilitating a seismic shift to the healthier alternative, eating to live.

But here’s the rub: eating healthy is confusing, time consuming and, unfortunately, oftentimes pricey.

So, anyone that can come in and cut through the healthy eating machine can carve out a necessary niche in the marketplace.

Enter Houstonian Mark Semmelbeck, founder and CEO of A Better Meal, a platform created to help busy families plan healthy meals easier and to make gradual improvements to their health and well-being.

“My vision is to use rapidly expanding AI technology together with the knowledge and wisdom of an active community to take the stress out of meal planning and improving nutrition,” says Semmelbeck, a seasoned oil and gas executive with over 30 years of experience in founding companies. “While developing the technology for the app, my daughter gave me two beautiful grandkids who both have significant food allergies. Combine that with the fact I now have five cardiac stents and the significance of eating well while paying attention to the details has only grown in importance.”

All-in-one app
Billed as the one-stop meal planning companion, A Better Meal promises users no additional stress in finding the time to look for recipes, make grocery lists, or prepare meals quickly. Families need healthy options and to be able to provide them with ease and that’s where this new application comes in.

“So, when I started A Better Meal, I wanted to answer two questions or help people answer two questions,” says Semmelbeck. “That is, a family gets home in the evening and they don't want to order out and they don't want to go out to eat, they can open up this app and it can tell them, ‘here's three things that you can make with what you have on hand that you like.’ The other question is, 'how can I make small changes to how I prepare my food, how I cook it, the ingredients that I use and small changes that can make my meals healthier.'

“So that was where we started. And then as we built the app out, got a minimum viable product out to people and in front of them, and we started seeing more as they used the app, what they actually wanted when they went to a meal planning app, so the last year and a half has been a process of refining the app to really set what people want in a meal planning and recipe app.”

When users download the app, which is a subscription-based tool, it starts with the simple things like, how many meals they’d like per day, if they have preferences in the types of food that they like, and, of course, if they have allergies.

Custom experience
Semmelbeck says that users are able to personalize the app and set up their own dashboard with meal planning. You can also use the app to analyze a new recipe you'd like to try.

"You can take a picture of, say a recipe written down, and you'd like to put that in your own personal database, you can take a picture of it, and it will interpret it and bring that into the app and then the app will calculate the calories and macros and the macro nutrients that that meal has in it so that you can see that information also," he says.

When it comes to food and meal planning, inserting the word “healthy” invariably invokes a litany of personal definitions, up to and including weight loss.

That definition isn’t wrong by any means, but for A Better Meal, it’s all about introducing healthier options into people’s everyday lives. The app won’t give you a specific diet to follow, but if users prefer a vegetarian, keto or paleo diet, the app will recommend recipes that will satisfy those disciplines.

“For a lot of people that's a huge help,” says Semmelbeck. “They just want to cook and eat healthier. They may like to have vegetarian days mixed in, but don't know where to find those recipes, the app can suggest recipes for a vegetarian meal. It can also recommend that substituting whole wheat flour for conventional flour for making pancakes, things like that.”

And for those users who don’t necessarily have a planned out starting place for meal preparation, they can search the internet or social media for meal plans and diets and then simply import those into the app.

“We also use AI to analyze recipes that would satisfy a certain type of diet that you would want to participate in,” says Semmelback. “But I will say that one of the main things we want to do is help you make small changes because again diets are great and a lot of people are on them, but few people maintain them for long periods of time because, in general, they can be very restrictive.

“So, we really want our goal to be able to help you make small changes with the things that you like to eat to make them healthier. And again, by healthy, certain kinds of fats are good, others you want to limit, certainly processed foods you want to limit, you want to limit the amount of added sugar, and you want to limit the amount of processed foods. That’s why we have our own nutritionist that helps us with those diets.”

Starting a journey
Currently, the nutritionist for A Better Meal is working just for the app in general, but as the platform grows, users will be about to ask direct questions or at least have access to educational materials about specific health issues, and specific diet recommendations for various health use.

“The app has been live for about a year and early on, we found that what people said they want is much different than what they actually use in the app. So, a lot of our work has been over the past year modifying the app, the way you move around in the app," says Semmelback. "We really want to use AI in ways that are helpful to people.

"I personally have dealt with heart disease, and I know that my doctor recommends less added sugar and processed foods. And so those are the kinds of things that we are using AI to do to help take recipes that you might like and make substitutions to those recipes so that they fit the kind of lifestyle you want," he continues. "What we're really concentrating on is the recipe part of the app and improving those and allowing them to be adaptable to the desires of the users. Finally, we really want to push into more education and more gamification where it actually makes it fun to use the app.”

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This article first appeared on our sister site InnovationMap.

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