Too Much Online Advertising

Sometimes, websites go a little too far with their online ads - to the point that you can't find the content you're looking for; or even sort the content from the ads.

A couple months ago, my wife and I visited my family, back on Long Island, for the Holidays. We had dinner at the Maine Maid Inn, in Jericho, NY, which was built in 1789. This afternoon, my mother and sister contacted me to tell me they had heard that the restaurant had closed down. But, they couldn't find any information about it.

My first stop was the leading Long Island newspaper, Newsday. I ran a search for the Maine Maid Inn and I was surprised that I couldn't find anything about it. So, I turned to the best place to get real time information, online: Twitter.

Here is what I found (click image to enlarge):
Hey, wait, there was an article published online by Newsday. Why didn't I find it? Well, I did, but didn't know it.

Can you find the article here? (click image to enlarge)
I'm sure, now that you know the search results I was looking for are really on that web page, you can see the article at the very bottom of the page. Unfortunately, for me, it wasn't very obvious. Should the Favorite Inns Guide, The Match, and the latest Newsday corrections really be the Top Results? Of course not.

Obviously, well placed ads are the key to getting results - unless you simply intend to bombard your viewers with as many ads as possible. There are more than half a dozen ads on that Newsday web page - I'm sure six, well placed ads, could be more than ten times as effective.

Twitter Search
If you search for most anything on Twitter you'll find what people are saying about it right now - and what they ever said about it. Next time you're watching a significant event, live, on T.V., do some searches on Twitter - you'll be amazed.

Update 3.1.2009
I just read this article about Newsday - they will probably end free access to current news articles on their web site. I just don't think they get it.

Cheers,
Joe

Security Hole Found, Fixed, and Deployed

Just before 10 am PST, today, a security hole was discovered, by chance, in Adjix2Twitter by Sam Nguyen which allowed him to post this tweet to Guy Kawasaki's Twitter timeline. I'd never heard of Sam or his company before today - he is the CTO at InsideWork which "infuses business innovation with biblical insight".

Since Twitter is about as real-time as it gets, the following happened within an hour of the problem being discovered by Sam:

1. I saw the tweet as soon as it was sent and I immediately reviewed the logs to discover that Guy hadn't posted it from his own Adjix account.

2. NEENZ, who is Alltop's Chief Evangelist, DM'd me about the tweet and called Guy.

3. A number of Guy's followers @'d him regarding the tweet - and many also RT'd it, seemingly "in the blind".

4. Twenty minutes after Sam discovered the problem he sent an e-mail to me outlining what he had done and I called him to get the details.

5. Guy, who was in a meeting when this happened, called me after the meeting to find out what was going on and what he needed to do.

6. Guy disavowed the tweet and proclaimed his love for Adjix.

Security Hole Details
While no one likes bugs, the one that Sam found was reproducible which makes it easier to fix.

To reproduce the problem, someone only needed to attempt to "reshrink" an Adjix link using Adjix2Twitter. Adjix2Twitter prevents an Adjix link from being "reshrunk" again and simply returns the original link. The problem was that the Twitter credentials associated with the original link were being used to post to Twitter. No Twitter user info and no Adjix user info was compromised or exposed. Exploiting this security hole only made it possible to post to someone else's Twitter account and it happened exactly once.

To fix this problem, our servers now ensure that the Linker's credentials of the user who clicked on the Adjix2Twitter bookmarklet are used and not the credentials associated with the link.

The Adjix2Twitter fix went live at 12:15 pm, about two hours after Sam first discovered the problem. All is well.

Cheers,
Joe

Mysterious Clicks

Last Friday I was talking on the phone to an old buddy, Andy, from high school. I wanted to show him a web page on the Adjix website so I created an Adjix link (redirect) to it and gave it to him over the phone. He manually typed the link into his web browser without any problems.

After we got off the phone I checked my Adjix link stats and noticed that there were two clicks on the newly created link. One link click was registered about 40 seconds after it was created which was obviously Andy typing it into his web browser. But, about 15 minutes later, while we were still on the phone, there was a second click from this IP address: 150.70.84.43

Who is 150.70.84.43?
This IP address is registered to Japan Network Information Center. This strikes me as a little odd since I live in San Diego and Andy lives in L.A. The only other useful thing I can tell you about this link click is that its user agent was Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1).

How did someone or, more likely, some bot, find out about my link within 20 minutes of it being created? I don't know. My best guess is that maybe Andy has some spyware on his Windows computer.

I'd love to hear you thoughts on this. Tweet them to me @Adjix or via e-mail: MysteryClick@adjix.com

Cheers,
Joe

Social Bookmarking Support Integrated into Adjix

We're happy to announce that social bookmarking for all major social networks has now been integrated directly into Adjix. When shrinking a link or posting a tweet you now have the ability to bookmark the link and "Tell a Friend" using:
Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo! mail, Google Talk, MSN, AOL Instant Messenger, Blogger, WordPress, Delicious, StumbleUpon, BuzzUp, Reddit, Slasdot, and more.

After shrinking a link through the Adjix website, simply mouse over the text field with the shorten link and choose how you'd like to bookmark your link or spread the word.

click to enlarge

When using Adjix2Twitter, your tweet link is automatically feed into the social bookmarking widget. From there you can edit it before bookmarking it or sending it on its way.

click to enlarge

Please don't hesitate to let us know what you think of the Tell a Friend widget.

Cheers,
Joe

Delayed Tweeting and Multiple Twitter Account Support

Today we rolled out a few key features to make using Adjix to tweet on Twitter even better.

1. Delayed Tweeting
2. Multiple Twitter Account Support
3. Adjix2Twitter with and without Link Shrink

1. Delayed Tweeting
Now you can use Adjix2Twitter to schedule tweets to be sent out either immediately or schedule them to go out hours, days, or months into the future. If you make a mistake scheduling a tweet, you can log into your Adjix Linker account and delete it.

2. Multiple Twitter Account Support
Adjix now supports multiple Twitter accounts. This is ideal for people who use one Twitter account for business and another for personal tweeting. If you already have an Adjix account then edit your profile to add a second Twitter account.

3. Adjix2Twitter with and without Link Shrink
With Adjix2Twitter Bookmarklets (also referred to as Firefox plug-ins) you have a choice: You can either shrink a link and tweet it with a single click or you can skip the link shrinking and tweet from inside your web browser in a single click.

Video: Adjix2Twitter with link shrink

Video: Adjix2Twitter without link shrink

Twitter Data Analysis

Twitter data analysis of 10.2M tweets from 2.7M users shows Adjix as the 9th most popular URL shortener on Twitter: http://adjix.com/n4e

Thoughts on Linking

We've encountered a small number of Internet purists who feel that people should not get paid to link to other websites under any circumstances. Obviously, this is exactly the opposite of how we, at Adjix, feel.

Content websites run ads (whether they're news sites or blogs) that generate revenues for the content providers. When a person forwards a link to a website, the person forwarding that link receives no benefit from the additional traffic he or she directed to the content provider. At Adjix, we're trying to help out the link forwarder and we call those people Linkers.

Options and More Options
Adjix has an option to not include any ads when Linkers use Adjix to shrink a link - but we still collect link click data for all Linkers. The data we collect is part of Adjix's "big payoff". Additionally, users have an option to remove an ad after clicking on an Adjix link. A couple months ago, an eject button icon was added in the upper right to remove Adjix ads and yesterday, to make it clearer, the eject button was replaced with a simple link that reads, "Remove ad".

Feedback
Many of our new features come from our users, either directly or via feedback.adjix.com. Like all startups, we have more features to implement than time in the day - but we're working as quickly as possible. Most recently, we've received excellent feedback on Adjix2Twitter and we'll be rolling out enhancements for this out soon.

We've noticed that a number of bloggers will constructively criticize Adjix in their blogs, but we may never hear of it; so don't forget to send us a link when you post your thoughts on Adjix. We'd love to hear your feedback, directly.