I wouldn't let that fear put you off if you have an idea your really passionate about. At the end of the day the success or failure of a startup/idea is in its execution and not exclusivity.
R.E EDIT - Yeah its a good blog post that, I wrote it =)
To be honest I'm just having a play with this news to get some reaction, I'm sure LI won't even bat an eye lid to it.
But good to hear that you see potential in our product, I'm sure your 'cohorts' will find their way on to Zerply sooner or later :p
Whats so disingenuous? I could easily of got someone else to post this for me if that was my aim. Im just sharing on HN what I've already shared on our blog and twitter. Not hiding anything here, I work for Zerply.
As for LinkedIn they have around 30 members of their core team logging into our site regularly, and have blatantly copied one of our core features and its copy. Do we care? Not really, as you said they are huge we are relatively small. Do we try to keep people honest, and at the same time boast of how proud we are to inspire the big boys, sure... why not =)
Tomorrow we go back to building a kick ass product and forget about it, until next time.
Good spot! We are planning to do a full site audit of that stuff, just been too busy with start-up life. We have 6 full time staff and not over a thousand like others.