As the Alpha of One True Fan currently stands it is just a fun game – a little like Foursquare where you can become the “One True Fan” of websites based upon a number of factors. I say that having never used Foursquare or any kind of location based social network. For me locations are the web pages I visit :)
Read more on One True Fan – Next Generation MyBlogLog Empowers Marketers…
People sharing Twitter passwords with rogue friend apps has been a problem for a few years – I have written quite a few posts warning people of the dangers of sharing passwords with insecure apps, and have also been critical of giant social networks continuing the practice of scraping data from other services using standard password authentication.
Read more on Twitter… About Password Security & OAuth…
I have been ranting and raving about insecure viral Tell-A-Friend scripts for over a year, and it seemed like I was just talking to a brick wall.
Now in the space of just a week I have been able to highlight a solution based upon one of my own blog posts that uses a slightly ghetto, but K.I.S.S method to achieve extremely effective viral tell-a-friend functionality, and now I want to mention another more sophisticated solution.
The other day I was slacking off on Twitter and clicked a link through to a JV promotion that I had seen in a number of emails, but hadn’t really taken much interest in. I hadn’t heard of the guy doing the promotion, and to be quite honest the topic didn’t seem to be the best match for this blog, though it does fit with the overall “Make Money Online” and “Work From Home” niches very well.
I am not sure what drove me to sign up as a JV partner with Dan, though the following factors almost certainly played a factor.
I have spent a fair amount of time since I signed up with Dan chatting with him on Skype – his commitment to his JV partners is exceptional, but I am sure that has also lead to significant improvements in his sales funnel as affiliates give him direct feedback.
We have all seen various improvements to sales funnels over time, and a lot of what Dan is doing will seem very familiar. The overall design of the landing pages, the opt-in etc, but Dan has added a few of his own twists that take things to a new level.
What is special is that the things Dan has added are smart and unobtrusive, but still catch the eye and achieve the desired effect – many of them he has coded himself.
It is a rare thing for me to see something and immediately reach for Skype and ask “Where did you get that script from?”
Twitter get Gmail and Google Apps hacked, but expose their customers to a similar danger
The security risks for your customers running viral tell-a-friend scripts and widgets.
This post is a year overdue – I have held back the material and refrained from pointing the finger for that period of time, but there is something I have noticed:-
If you don’t kick up a big stink, possibly including names, any advice just gets swept under the carpet.
Optin Accelerator is a massive security risk for your customers – rather than fix the security problems, the new version just adds fluff without addressing core issues.
Anyone can make a mistake, release a product without considering all the possible ramifications, but to release Opt-in Accelerator again without major changes is irresponsible.
So far there have been 3 such scripts I have written about, and there is a 4th “coming soon”
Jeff over at Coding Horror has just been taking a small pop at Yelp for requiring email account access to find friends
Email is the de-facto master password for a huge swath of your online identity. Tread carefully:
* As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It’s unethical. It’s irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
* As a user, you should never provide your email credentials to anyone except your email service. Sites that ask you for this information are to be regarded with extreme suspicion if not outright distrust.
This is the same terrible system used by many large social networks, and 2 scripts I recently strongly advised internet marketers not to use.
Viral Inviter, with even heavier marketing and endorsements, will have a huge long-term negative effect on email marketing, with the rewards quickly being overtaken by a backlash of negative sentiment and poorer email delivery which will be universal.
Plurk which has very recently become very popular also suffers from this evil invite and finding friends method, but at least has a redeeming feature.
Another tell-a-friend like Facebook / Myspace / Linkedin etc script seems to have launched today
http://www.viraloptingenerator.com/index.php
This script is different to Optin Accelerator in a number of ways
In theory that makes it almost exactly the same as the scripts used by the big boys of Web2.0 though their servers are less likely to conk out the first time someone with 200 contacts in Gmail uses the script if you are on shared or even most reseller hosting. You would probably have
When I first read about Optin Accelerator I had a few initial thoughts
Now I hoped that as soon as people realised it was a bad idea despite having massive
