Savvy Internet surfer Chris Crompton has found a flaw in Groupon’s email link encryption where adding the search term “addx” (exact Google search = allinurl: addx site:groupon.com) brings up about 35 or so emails of people who have subscribed to the Groupon newsletter.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson on how Hubpages succeeded in amassing visitors. After the recent TechCrunch post about HubPages, we received several questions about how HubPages got to 39 million unique visitors per month. Here’s how we did it: Four years ago, during our launch in August 2006, we wanted to do three main things to create a successful social content community: first, we wanted to make it easy for authors to create a one-page topical website; second, we wanted to drive traffic to the author’s content; and third, we wanted to share the majority of the revenue back with the author. We had planned for natural search to be a major source of traffic, but it wasn’t until November of 2006 that we started to get measurable traffic from search engines. To this day, we continue to refine our platform to help authors on HubPages to have the best opportunity to show up in the natural search results. One of the key metrics we learned was about the longevity of content
We had a special guest for this week’s episode of OMG/JK, the show I host alongside fellow writer Jason Kincaid: the new MacBook Air. If you’ve been waiting to see two guys endlessly fawn over something, watch above. And once we wiped the drool off of our faces, we also discussed Kleiner Perkins’ new sFund, the $250 million fund to back new social applications. And we talk a bit about the Google TV, its awful remotes, and the quickly heating up connected television space. Here are some posts relevant to the topics we discuss: Behold: The New MacBook Air
All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup , and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger. It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them. The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook. For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them. Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward. But that’s not how the government sees it. In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy. Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo : “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.” And it gets worse.
While there are many players in the mobile advertising market, there’s no doubt that there’s a little bit of a rivalry between Google’s ad network AdMob and Apple’s new foray into mobile ads, iAd. Some say iAd is taking some of AdMob’s share in the mobile ad market thanks to better performance. One of the cornerstones to iAd’s claimed success is that the format was developed by the company that actually makes both the device and OS and provides a more engaging experience. The same theory is probably what has made RIM enter the mobile ad wars, recently launching a mobile ad platform for BlackBerry phones. But AdMob contends that its platform is still appealing to advertisers because it allows brands to reach consumers across many different mobile platforms with similar engaging ad formats, whereas programs like iAd restrict advertisers to one device. Oh, and there’s the minimum $1 million ad buy Apple reportedly requires to serve ads through its network.
Well this is sort of interesting. Apparently, Twitter has just kicked off something they’re calling their “Hack Week”. But instead of it being a time when various third-party developers get together to hack on things off of Twitter’s APIs, Twitter employees themselves are going to see what crazy cool things they can come up with. A post on their engineering blog outlines this. “ We’ll all be building things that are separate from our normal work and not part of our day-to-day jobs ,” the post notes. This sounds a lot like Google’s “20 percent time” — Google employees are encouraged to spend up to 20 percent of their time working on interesting side projects not directly related to their actual work. In the past, as they dealt with scaling problems, Twitter hasn’t had such a luxury. But with New Twitter out the door (and its new backend), they apparently feel comfortable enough to screw around on some crazy stuff. That could be good news for us, the users. Some of the coolest stuff Google has come up with has been from 20 percent projects. Here’s the key blurb: There aren’t many rules – basically we’ll work in small teams and share our projects with the company at the end of the week. What will happen with each project will be determined once it’s complete
Gift card affiliate startup JungleCents announces today the closing of a seed round of financing in which billionaire Mark Cuban is the only investor. Along with Cuban as an advisor, the JungleCents board includes Hollywood producer Peter Safran , Guy Kawasaki and Bill Reichert from Garage Ventures .