I’ve been beta testing MSN Messenger 7.0 on my Tablet PC for a little while now, and yesterday they released it officially. Associated Press:

The newest version of MSN Messenger instant messaging product, released late Wednesday, allows consumers to download free backgrounds, pictures and other content tied to specific ad campaigns. The hope is that users will then share those downloads with other consumers - providing another boost to advertisers, who pay Microsoft for the privilege.

Install process: I unchecked the defaults to add the toolbar, MSN search, change my home page to MSN and MSN shortcuts — no thanks to any of that.

Downloaded free background: I decided to download the eyeball graphic from Blue Mountain. It asked for my email and then after submitting it went to a screen with no instructions as to what to do next — and no download either. I guess this information comes in the email? Nope. You just need to go to Tools -> My Backgrounds and choose the download from there.

I’m not much for IM chat, but I do like the ability to ink from within MSN Messenger which I can’t do in the other IM applications .

Speaking of advertisements, I just noticed that Volvo is advertising on MSN Spaces (pictured above, my space here). I hadn’t seen any third-party advertising until this on Spaces. I’m surprised that I don’t see more car advertisements online (with the places I frequent, anyway), but then maybe most auto manufacturers think us geeks don’t drive much.

Imagine this: bicycle riders selling advertising via LED messages from the spokes while they drive around? Messages programmable via a device in the palm of their hand? With Hokey Spokes, this could very well be possible for as little as $29.95 per Hokey Spoke. Hokey Spokes - Bicycle safety lights with fun new twist

Hokey Spokes are unique bicycle safety lights that allow riders to display computer-generated images and text inside the spoke cages while riding at night. Not only are Hokey Spokes fun and interesting, but they also provide important side visibility, which is mostly unavailable in today’s standard bicycle lights.

The rainbow ones which are currently sold out look especially Grateful Deadesq. Thanks to Gizmodo

The question in the title is rhetorical. The answer? Wordpress, blogging software that this blog is currently using, has absolutely nothing to do with asbestos.

This could prove to be a very ugly bump in the road for Wordpress. What am I talking about? This comes via Andy Baio from Waxy.org:

I discovered last week that since early February, [Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress has] been quietly hosting almost 120,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default.

Mr. Baio then asks two important questions:

Do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they’re making money off the project?

Yes, I think they do. The fact that Wordpress is a blog program, not an article repository is bound to confuse at least some people (see screenshot above). They could start another site called: wordpressarticles.com or something. Also, it’s wordpress.org not wordpress.com. Isn’t .org supposed to be for non-profit organizations? Yes, I do realize that there are lots of profit-generating commercial sites using .org extensions. I have no idea if Matt Mullenweg is making a penny after expenses from Wordpress but I’m guessing Wordpress is definitely not setup as a registered non-profit.

Second, is it ethical for open-source projects to make money gaming search engines?

It’s unethical for anybody on any website to break the rules of another website. Google specifically has guidelnies (might be a stretch on my part calling them “rules”) against this kind of behavior and Matt might be young and perhaps still a bit naive, but that’s not an excuse. In short, he should know better. I don’t know the guy personally but I am impressed that, along with others, he’s generated 100,000 Wordpress downloads and I’ve used his software, with varying results, on a number of blogs without paying a dime, which means that I certainly don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I suggested to one of our hosting companies to use Wordpress for both their official blog and their customers, so I have helped the cause in a roundabout way.

But.

None of this excuses a really bad business decision. I believe Matt will do the right thing here and move these articles to a more appropriate location and hopefully post haste. In fact, here’s what Mullenweg told Mr. Baio specifically about the situation:

… if the user community didn’t like it, he’d end the program. “Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don’t want it. At the same time, if you think people don’t care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation.”

My vote as a user is all for moving this totally unrelated articles program to another more appropriate domain or ending the program altogether. At the very least, put up some disclosure or make it be at a third level domain. I’m not adverse to the concept of Mr. Mullenweg and the Wordpress team making money, but they do need to spell these things out very clearly how they are making money.

And if the Wordpress future is going to be a non-charitable, profitable enterprise, then get a dot.com going. Please.

Update 3/31: Google has already removed the offending articles from its index and stripped Wordpress.org from PR8 to PR0 over the engineered, cloaked pages.

Update 4/1/05: From his vacation in Italy Mullenweg responds with a lengthy apology, accepting full responsibility for the colossal advertising blunder. His choice of calling the response to this “noise” is a bit unsettling. Might have been better to call it: “responding to my mistake” but the piece itself was written eloquently and seems genuine anyway.

The Alexa toolbar, part of the Amazon family, has been under fire many times before as being too intrusive and in some cases even labeled flagged still today by spyware/adware vendors as a threat concern. Amazon’s A9 search is connected with Amazon, as is 43 Things. All this data sharing happening between the sites — or at least the capability for doing so. Amazon maintains that this sharing of information is beneficial to their customers because they can customize sales material (books, movies, music, etc) and other site features based on user activity.

Hmm.

I like tracking and customization of features and I don’t have a problem with Amazon using contexual search, but I do think that they push the privacy envelope about as far as it can be pushed by not allowing me as their customer to be able to tell them what they can and can’t do with information they are collecting from me. It’s one thing if the website is free, but when they use the history of my purchasing decisions to compare and contrast to help them make sales to others that’s a really gray area. Particularly when it comes to tracking what gifts I give others. I’m not sure how relative that is if a geek buys friends a towel set. So, are they going to determine that geeks like towel sets?

I digress. Amazon, if it really wants to be looking out for its customers, should allow its customers to opt-out of tracking.

TiVO tracks stuff too, and as a former paying customer (yup, we don’t have TiVO any more after years of service) I never cared for my inability to opt out of that. Again, it’s one thing if it’s a free service tracking what I do, but when I’m paying for it, I feel like they should let me control how my purchasing information is utilyzed in their marketing.

What do you think? Do you even care what’s done with your purchase history at a website?

With all the casino-related spam hammering comment areas of blogs, it surprised me today to see so few Technorati taggings for “casinos” (18) or “casino” (10). I figured that these tags would literally be exploding with spam, but not the case. Throw up a new Wordpress blog with no spam protection turned on and within days you’ll be seeing all kinds of casino/gambling-related spam. One of the conversations we had at Northern Voice was how Technorati tags would become the victim of spam, but here’s one example that disproves this. At least so far.

For all the money Google is making pre- and post-IPO, their Gmail spam filter still doesn’t work worth a damn. There’s my Gmail inbox pictured above crowded with hundreds of drugs/pharmacy-related spam (my entire 100 message inbox is pharmacy-related spam at the moment). I’ve now burned through — in less than six months — three complete iterations of spam (that’s 3 GB); that means I’ve had spam filled up the box three times and deleted back down (with the help of the auto delete function) that much email. I mark this garbage as spam every time, but is the Gmail filter smart enough to figure this out? Nope. This is to a Gmail address that I’ve never told anybody to send spam to or published online publically anywhere, so heaven help the people who have actually published their Gmail addresses for email-thirsty harvesting bots. The 30-day auto spam removal is working right now, but I still wish there was a mass delete spam bin option (without needing to run a third party script).

To those who say the spam problem is getting better? They obviously aren’t doing that much business on the web. It’s gotten at least five times worse for us over the last 12 months. CAN-SPAM? Bah.

This Paris Hilton cracked Sidekick story just doesn’t seem to die:

Juicy, celebrity-drenched data from the spacey “Simple Life” star’s trendy Sidekick — including hoards of personal phone numbers of stars, gossipy e-mails and apparently raunchy photos of the hotel heiress herself — were splashed on the ‘Net after a hacker seemingly broke through security at T-Mobile’s user Web site and siphoned off her information.

I wasn’t going to comment on it because Paris Hilton gets so much press for being ignorant that it’s silly. First of all, in this day and age, one shouldn’t give out personal phone numbers or sensitive personal information to anyone except family and very close friends. Business numbers? Promotion, baby!

I have a hard time believing that Paris Hilton was close friends with the 500 or so people she had in her cracked Sidekick. Especially if you are a celebrity, why would you trust giving your number to somebody like Paris Hilton who is not particularly well known for discretion and privacy (IE. public sex tape scandals)? Why not give a business number? Perhaps a trusted representative that could forward on the legitimate calls?

It’s certainly criminal that somebody cracked Hilton’s device and posted the important numbers on the internet and I hope those person(s) responsible are brought to justice, but don’t celebrities have to change their phone numbers frequently to keep away from rabid fans, anyway? Goes with the territory, in my mind. And with all the money Paris Hilton has: why hasn’t she hired a techie to help encrypt and share all her private data? It’s almost starting to smell to me like intentional PR. Wouldn’t that be something if it comes out that Paris made it all too easy for these leaks to occur … I don’t know anything of course and this is wild speculation, but what if?

Mike Masnick from Techdirt has explained the problem with spyware better and more concisely than I’ve read anywhere else in recent memory.

The problem here is that the marketing companies are defining spyware in a different way than average users are. The average user defines it as “crap that I don’t know how it got on my computer, and is slowing it down with marketing info, while probably collecting data on everything I do.” The marketing companies take a much more… nuanced view. They consider their apps to be “adware,” whereas spyware is only the more malicious variety. The problem is, users don’t distinguish. All they know is they didn’t ask for this software, it’s slowing their computer down, and they want it off. What’s most telling of course, is that the marketing companies are spending their time working on the PR aspect, and not making their products any less sneaky and underhanded in how they get installed.

After reading this I immediately thought of Steve Rubel recently pimping the PR company he works for, CooperKatz, and how great listeners they were over a complaint about Weatherbug, which is a client they represent. Googling reveals numerous vexing questions about Weatherbug (which is often bundled with well known parasite MySearch). Maybe Mr. Rubel should pay closer attention to Mike’s last sentence above especially (the bolding is mine, BTW). Interesting seeing what unfolds once the problems get discussed in detail in Rubel’s comment area. A commenter named Nick laid out the specifics, to which Rubel or his client Weatherbug as of this writing has not yet given a reply:

Hi, Id like to tell your team exactly what is wrong with the software it makes. It installed a toolbar on in IE without me giving it permission to do so. I never want to see the window unless I click on a Weatherbug icon. Do legitiment programs like Word pop up by themselves? No. It shouldnt have alerts or whatever you call them. The traffic section is completely useless and is just used for ad space. We understand that ads pay your bills, but if you are going to put ads in the system just be upfront and honest with us. Don’t try to make the ads look like features.

It is this type dialog that should be discussed and resolved out in the open and not one-to-one. Yeah, it’s great that Rubel discovered somebody talking negatively about Weatherbug and facillitated the connection between the “vigilante” (his description, not mine) and their client, but what is the solution for the other disgruntled users equally disturbed by this functionality in Weatherbug? Will there simply be a rush to give the squeaky wheels grease or will these issues truly be resolved in an upgrade to the software?

A few months back Robert Scoble was told by Google program manager Chris Uhlik that the reason the Gmail wasn’t opened to the general public yet was because they were worried they wouldn’t have enough server space. Scoble went as far as to write that in the comments here when I suggested the strong possibility that this rationing of Gmail invites was really just a marketing move:

“They can’t just turn everyone on all at once. It’d ruin the experience for who is already on the servers.” - Robert Scoble - 06 November ‘04 - 03:35

I still feel that way, and even more so today. Why? Look at what’s happened the last few months. Actions speak louder than words and there’s plenty of activity that disproves the notion that Google is short on server space.

Want a Gmail invite? No? I totally understand, you probably already have one or have been offered one many, many, many times by now. We’ve tried to give them away on our web radio show and there’s very, very few takers. If someone reading this actually does want one, then just use the comments section as my wife, myself and a couple people who work with us have plenty to give away and we’d be happy to hook you up.

Gmail used to sparingly give out three at a time, then they went to six at a time, and now they’ve ramped it up to 50 at a time. Since we have quite a few to give away they are just wasting digital space and we’ll give them away to anyone who asks in this thread that doesn’t already have a gmail invite (yes, a few folks that have asked have actually signed their emails with Gmail addresses — doh!). 

Frankly, I’m totally mystified that Google hasn’t opened this up to the general public yet. Yeah, yeah, I know they can claim they don’t have enough servers and it’s difficult to prove that statement false. But it’s my opinion that this is BS because they keep adding/acquiring services like Keyhole which we all know are taking up tons of server space (satellite imagery for the entire US) and they just volunteered to do some of the hosting for the Wiki project. Yup — insert heavy sarcasm — they seem to be acting like they are on a real server crunch over there.

Look, at this point, I don’t really care if this was a marketing move or not, Google. What I do care about is that you stop making it the rest of the web’s job (bloggers) to be your Gmail distribution channel (and Orkut, which has even less demand) when the demand is so low that server space isn’t a legitimate concern anymore. At one point, that premise made some sense, but it doesn’t now and in fact, it makes you look like a bunch of waffling politicians (and who believes politicians!).

I have a sinking feeling (and really I hope I’m wrong) that the majority of the people who are left actually wanting Gmail invites are scammers and spammers and by posts like this and other bloggers doing something similar we are just aiding and abedding the wrong types of netizens at this point. Sorry to be all cynical to start out the morning, but there has been a very phony feel to the recent requests this blog has received for Gmail invites, but since Google won’t open up Gmail to the general public, these people have to resort to begging on blogs.  I guess the response should be just to ignore the invites there, but I don’t want to be responsible for leaving somebody out who legitimately wants to sample/use the service. Shame on you Google, for continuing to assign this responsibility to your users.

So c’mon Google, just open up Gmail already! I know you have a serious infatuation with keeping things beta (Google News) but enough of the PR spin! PR spin is evil. Remember your motto, please. The no server space dog just isn’t hunting any more.

This is a story that should be spread around on every blog. It’s time to give the bottom feeders who aid spammers as well as the spammers themselves a hard time, figuratively and literally.

The soft-spoken Jason Smathers of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, entered the plea to conspiracy charges in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where he was likely to face from 18 months to two years in prison at a May 20 sentencing. Smathers also faces mandatory restitution of between $200,000 and $400,000, the amount the government estimates AOL spent as a result of the e-mails.

Whenever we’ve been with AOL we felt the spam threshold was higher except for our last time where it seemed like it had gotten a little better. Amazing (well, not really) how at one time you could create a new screenname and within a week be receiving all kinds of spam.