• It took a long time for internet marketers to copy the viral signup mechanisms used by many internet startups, including the more established Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace etc.
• It is a massive business security risk
• People are going to buy it and use it and their customers are going to face the risk
• Some of my subscribers might damage their business either by using it for one of their sites, or giving their account access away.

Now I hoped that as soon as people realised it was a bad idea despite having massive viral potential, the product would be pulled.

Currently it looks like the site has been closed – I have high regards for Reed Floren and Matt Haslem who launched it, so I am assuming it is off the market.

That being said, I have seen a few people using it still – if it is just limited circulation, some people need to be a little careful.

So where did they go wrong?

What Did Optin Accelerator Do?

Quite simply you hand over your login information to your primary email account, and it scrapes addresses so you can send an email to all your friends about a new service you have found, or product.
Yes… exactly the same process as is used by many Web2.0 sites, but you don’t have to worry about the technical details of how things work, because the script is on their servers, and calls home.

This means that your subscribers are sharing their personal login information to their email account with a 3rd party just to promote your product.
The big guys are generally using 1st party scripting, still risky but at least you know who has your data (I would never use it though)

Robert Plank has gone into that aspect of Optin Accelerator in some depth

Here is part of the comment I left on his blog post

Google has unified login, so does Yahoo and MSN.

By handing over login information, you are hading over not only your email (which could be full of important passwords for affiliate accounts) but also providing access to Adsense, Adwords, Google Analytics, Google AppEngine (if you are a geek)

It would also allow someone to reset every password you have which sends resent information to your emil, such as all your wordpress blogs, hosting etc.

Handing over this information is throwing your whole internet business into turmoil.

Would you want to encourage your own subscribers to do that?

Robert has actually gone through all the terms of service of each of the large online email services, and it seems handing over your account details is breaking their terms and conditions. How the hell do the big guys get away with such a security risk?

If that isn’t bad enough, it has been determined

• It is against Aweber’s terms of service (as are all tell-a-friend scripts) – that being said, I know people who use tell-a-friend scripts who primarily use Aweber – I have no idea how they get away with that.
  A guy in Robert’s comments (Craig) posted a response from Aweber

  Thank you very mush for bringing this to our attention. We have taken action to contact the owners of that product.

  Please understand that this was done without our consent, and will be fully addressed. We take many steps here to ensure your deliverability, including monitoring the use of customer accounts, so that even should someone use this type of program without our consent, we would remove them from the service.

  Thank you again for bringing this to light. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to let me know.

  Regards,
  Tracey Churray
  Director Of Customer Solutions

• Most hosting affiliates use would have problems handling the emails being sent, unless they are using SMTP through Gmail for instance
• If it is a really good product, shouldn’t you be promoting it as an affiliate?
• Melody from Women’s Net also mentioned the possibility of liability
• Plaxo provide fwidget for free that could be integrated to achieve effectively the same – that is slightly less risky (suggested by David L. Cross)
• Randolf Smith goes into the nature of email address books (all those friends and family) – how many are really interested in a specific product? Also as an affiliate, why would you promote something for free? At least Tell-A-Friend scripts often pass on your affiliate links, but that only works down one level – if it is really good, isn’t promoting to your list or blog readers better?

People You Know vs Sending Email

If you are going to use one of these scripts, it is much better to use the export and import contact list options often provided.
If there isn’t anything provided, you can also create a new email account just for importing contacts which has no private information.

I can see a real reason to find people you already know on a service – maybe services should be using the MyBlogLog API in a smart way.

If your service encourages every person who joins to send out 100s of emails, it becomes spam even if it technically isn’t if they are personal contacts, and you are doing it in a non-professional capacity.

During a routine check of functionality I discovered that the “get” method of form completion which was used by the fast connection solution is now being blocked, and thus have made a notification post on the LinkedIn Answers service within “Using LinkedIn”, and have also changed the graphic that was being served to a number of sites to hopefully notify them of the change.

Multiple solutions had been suggested by LinkedIn users that would allow the functionality to remain without posing a security threat, but LinkedIn it seems decided to choose the route of blocking the service.

I don’t want to speculate as to why it was removed, or why I wasn’t notified in any way directly that such action was being taken.

The LinkedIn Fast Generator I created is proving to be one of the most successful “features” of this site, and is bringing me into contact with lots of extremely smart networkers in the LinkedIn community, and my contact list and network is growing rapidly.

• Growth is happening almost on auto-pilot, though I always have the choice of which invites I accept based on the industry someone comes from.
• I always accept invites from my blog readers if I recognise them, and the remainder I accept on a fairly adhoc basis depending on the related industry, and whether that connection will be useful sometime down the road.
• The majority of invites I receive are actually very appropriate – that would actually surprise most people because the obvious temptation when people first visit the site to see the generator is to test it out on someone, and I am the obvious target.

Most of the invites I receive are:-

• Cancelled within seconds – some people just test it out and then cancel the invite – no major harm done as clicking through from the email notifications I receive only takes me 5 seconds
• Internet Marketing Related – I have been picking up quite a few internet marketing related invites which are great – it is good to see people in internet marketing using LinkedIn
• General Marketing – I love to receive invites from various marketing professionals – marketing is very much a contacts game
• Information Technology – Probably the largest sector, I now have contacts within a multitude of web development companies and startups. I expect that list to grow rapidly
• Search Engine Optimization – I have been picking up a few invites within the SEO field
• VCs / Investment – A slow mover, but I would like to grow my contacts in this sector
• Local Connections – I really appreciate gaining local connections, you would be amazed at how useful some connection become in the not so distant future

I haven’t received any invites that I would regard as spam. Those users who were just testing and didn’t mean to invite me deleted their invite (I had 2 like that while writing this post).

LinkedIn FAST Unofficially Approved?

I have mentioned in the past that LinkedIn staff were aware of the generator and didn’t see any major problems with using it, though that was by private email. Recently that was confirmed on a LinkedIn Answers thread.

Code Improvements

Over the last few days I have been tweaking the script to generate other useful versions of the same invite code, based largely on the feedback I have received from users.

• Improved SEO – The generated links that point to a LinkedIn form now contain the rel=”nofollow” command for slightly improved SEO

Just Click to Connect

Get your own LinkedIn Fast

• HTML Text Version – The form now creates a HTML text link version which might be more suitable for some designs

LinkedIn FAST
Just Click to Connect

• Ugly Raw URL – The form now automatically generates a URL that you can use with services like TinyURL.com – This is a much better option than trying to edit a URL manually. I should note that I own a similar script to tinyURL, and could create a service similar that in some way represents what the link is for. I don’t particularly want to build up a database of 100,000 LinkedIn users, plus there are trademark issues.

http://www.linkedin.com/inviteMany?firstName.0=Andy&lastName.0=Beard&emailAddress.0=list.andy%40gmail.com&subject=Join+Me+Now!&salutation=NAME&greeting=Invite+for+you&invite=Send+Invitation%28s%29&inviteeID.0=&isMessageOptional=false&default_cell_count=1&contentTemplateID=std_inv_2e

• Custom Redirect – I have created what I feel is better for most LinkedIn users who have access to their server by FTP, which is a custom redirect. The generator now creates the code for this as well.

<html><head><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"><meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.linkedin.com/inviteMany?firstName.0=Andy&lastName.0=Beard&emailAddress.0=list.andy%40gmail.com&subject=Join+Me+Now!&salutation=NAME&greeting=Invite+for+you&invite=Send+Invitation%28s%29&inviteeID.0=&isMessageOptional=false&default_cell_count=1&contentTemplateID=std_inv_2e"> </head> <body> </body> </html>
In emails you can thus use a link that will look like this http://andybeard.eu/linkedin/
The same link could also be used for press releases, article marketing, inside Word or PDF documents, or in a signature on discussion forums.

Hopefully you find my LinkedIn Widget Generator easy to use.

If you have any suggestions, or require any help in implementing this code, feel free to leave a comment and don’t forget to share this with your friends and contacts.

LinkedIn Fast

1. Dig up someone’s email address
2. Add First Name
3. Add Last Name
4. Enter Email
5. Change Message
6. Submit
7. Enter Username and Password

How do I fix that… FAST?

So I had a look at the submission form and wondered if I could hack a one click invite button.

The form uses the POST method, thus nothing appears in the URL bar – POST is actually the correct method because submitting the form changes data.

However that doesn’t necessarily mean that GET wouldn’t work, it just needs converting.

First of all here is a handy little bookmarklet I picked up some time ago. What you do is fill in a form that uses POST, click this bookmarklet to convert the page to GET, and then submit the forum.
in the URL box you will then see a GET instruction URL that can be played with.

I made the emails extremely short – I will know the invites came from my button

I then removed excess data, because I didn’t need this for someone to invite 5 people, I just wanted it so people could invite me quickly if they wanted to.

I tested it inviting myself, and it seems to work, because I received an error message stating that you can’t invite yourself. :)

LinkedIn Fast

I created a nice button

Just Click to Connect

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/inviteMany?firstName.0=YOURFIRSTNAME&lastName.0=YOURLASTNAME&emailAddress.0=EMAILUSERNAME%40EMAILDOMAINNAME&subject=Join+Me+Now!&salutation=NAME&greeting=invite+for+you&invite=Send+Invitation%28s%29&inviteeID.0=&isMessageOptional=false&default_cell_count=1&contentTemplateID=std_inv_2e"><img src='http://cdn5.andybeard.name/wp-content/uploads/linkedin-fast-160x33.png' alt='LinkedIn Fast' /></a><br /><small>Just Click to Connect</small>

Things to Change:-

• YOURFIRSTNAME
• YOURLASTNAME
• EMAILUSERNAME
• EMAILDOMAINNAME

Your mileage may vary, but this seems to work. Licensed under GPL

If there is enough demand, I might make a small code generator for this so it creates the code for you.

Note this doesn’t break the system in any way, but you might get more invites :)

Update: I just received my first LinkedIn Connection using the button, so it certainly works

I just received a contact request from Joe Beaulaurier of PRWeb. He had visited my blog, maybe liked what he read, and had also already joined my community. There is a fair chance he has also subscribed to my RSS feed.

I then visited his blog, see that he is talking about similar related subjects and I subscribe to his feed. I discuss a lot about article marketing especially in relation to using Article Marketer, which is very similar in many ways to the Press Release service offered by PR Web where Joe works.

If you take a look at his list of contact requests, you will see that most of them are industry related, people he might be expected to make connections with via other avenues, and people who would maybe want to make contact with him.

The next thing I noticed was that on his about page he has his LinkedIn button. Not one to pass up on growing my new LinkedIn network, I went searching for his email address to send him an invite to my network. For a marketing person, his email address was actually quite hard to find, but I got there in the end.

Another Rumour of MyBlogLog being aquired surfaced today on GigaOm, but his source seems to have pulled the article.

If I was MyBlogLog I wouldn’t sell. They are experiencing high growth and just need to clamp down on people exploiting the system. The invitation system just needs to be made automation proof.

This is probably the best reason to join LinkedIn as it allows you to not only find contacts, but also to demonstrate your skills which I believe is an essential part of the sales & marketing process.

It is suddenly worth joining… so I did

It is one of the things I have been planning to do, but the answers service escalated the value in using the service.