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Facebook vanity URLs

By marcus Filed in Links Tagged with , , March 22nd, 2009 @ 12:08

Chris has a interesting analysis of a recent move by Facebook to support username urls:

Arrington has a post that claims that “Facebook is getting wise to something MySpace has known from the start – users love vanity URLs.”

I don’t buy it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the omission of vanity URLs on Facebook is an intentional design decision from the beginning, and one that I’ve learned to appreciate over time.

I think this change is another result of Facebook’s apparent fear and envy of twitter’s recent popularity. However, I believe they fullfill different social functions, and that Facebook’s attempts at competing in Twitter’s function only weakens it’s existing position.

The Hunt For The Apple Store Associates Program

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with , , , March 6th, 2009 @ 21:08

As you might know, we run a software site for mac users, i use this. The site is free to use, and we finance it through the use of advertisments. Mostly we get advertisments from the Google ads program, as well as indie shareware developers, and occationally promotional programs like macheist.

I figure Apple Products would be a good fit for our users, so I was pleased when a quick Google Search turned up the Apple Store Associates Program.

Apple Store Associates Program - Login

On going to the ‘Register’ link, I noticed that they use the linkshare program, where we are already signed up as part of the iTunes Store program. However, using the linkshare site I was not able to locate the Apple Store Associates program. At this point I was a bit puzzled. I figured maybe I needed to sign up with a new account on linkshare, so I try that, is redirected to a newer signup form, and after registration, is just landed on the regular linkshare homepage. Still no sign of the associates program.

I figured I should try to contact them by mail. They list a contact email on the frontpage, but unfortunately it bounces:

    The Symantec Brightmail Gateway program : host elderberry.apple.com[17.128.115.181] said:
   550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: storeassociates@apple.com (in reply to
   RCPT TO command)

Now I am ready to give up. Anyone got a lead? Drop me a mail at marcus@nordaaker.com.

Big oops for Spotify?

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with , March 4th, 2009 @ 21:04

I just received a mail from Spotify about a security issue:

Along with passwords, registration information such as your email
address,birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt
details were potentially exposed. Credit card numbers are not
stored by us and were not at risk. All payment data is handled
by a secure 3rd party provider.

Oh well. At least they hashed our passwords and secured the credit card transactions. All in all, I think they’ve handled themselves very well. Kudos for being so up front about this as well.

linkhack – a smarter search?

By marcus Filed in Links Tagged with , February 22nd, 2009 @ 00:22

The search dropdown feature of firefox has never been one of my favorite features. It just takes too long to switch between them, so I’ve mostly left it at google, and hoped it would be smart enough to understand what I mean. However, with linkhack, it just proxies through to google most of the time, but understands keywords such as ‘imdb’ to do a movie search, or ‘img’ to do a image search.

I’m quite pleased that they are using iusethis to ‘get’ an application as well (try ‘get firefox’, for instance). I can’t help but think that this maybe should be implemented in the browser itself rather than as a web application, but it’s definitively an interesting concept. one thing that worries me is if I’ll be wanting to google those magic keywords some times. Of course, you can always prefix queries with “google”.

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