Spam Hunters Become a Digg Spammers Best Friend
Duncan Riley
32 comments »
New service Collactive comes to the world courtesy of the team behind the failed Israeli outfit Blue Security, best known for running the anti-spam service Blue Frog. Wildly popular at first, the denial of service attacks from BlueFrog (be it a DOS from a moral high ground) rubbed spammers the wrong way and in May last year all hell broke lose, taking down SixApart amongst others. They subsequently gave in and shut the service.
What we didn’t know then was that having lost the battle in the war against spam, they’d actually manufacture arms for the opposing side.
Collactive works as a distribution service for what they call an All Points Bulletin (APB). You add, social bookmarking style a page on Digg or any where else to the APB system, then others are notified of the page. At this point the service differs. Users are directed to Collactive itself as opposed directly to the marked page. The page is presented with a Collactive frame to the left of screen that includes notes on the action required, for example “vote for this”. Traffic for your submitted pages comes from other collactive users plus there is support for emailing friends, a browser extension and a blog widget for displaying your APBs.
There are non-controversial uses for the site, any sort of page can be listed. However the real intent in terms of use is clearly promoted through out the site. The top listed APB when I visited the site was a request to vote on a story at Digg and other social networks were also listed amongst APB’s and social networking site logos were used in promotional material.
Collactive is funded by Sequoia. Yes, that Sequoia.
Maybe there is something more to the service than spamming Digg? Of course there is aside from a name that sounds like medication; it works for spamming Reddit and Netscape as well!
7 words -
“how the fk did they get funding?”
That really confuses me. I don’t get the purpose of this site.
Agree with Hari. I have no idea what the purpose is.
Seems a myspace with mob intellectually /
- mashed up
- But also this is atleast a left jab - thrown at digg
Duncan - You’re misquoting Digg’s CEO.
From the original WSJ article -
“There’s a difference if you’re a marketing company and you want to get something manipulated to the top,” says Digg’s Mr. Adelson.
The “but Collactive is taking it to another level” is alarm:clock’s interpretation.
BTW, WSJ also quotes Scott Moore, senior vice president at Yahoo in charge of news and information saying that Yahoo Inc. don’t object to the use of Collactive’s bulletins. “People using Yahoo News’s ‘most popular’ or ‘most emailed’ as a kind of grass-roots marketing tool is just fine with us,”.
All and all, I agree with Mark above - you may have misinterpreted the service - It seems to be nothing more than a sophisticated “Digg this” button.
I wonder how long it will be before people create an APB to click-fraud their competitors!
I’m a member of the Genocide Intervention Network, an organization that fights the genocide in Darfur, and got an email yesterday that seems to use Collactive’s service: http://www.genocideintervention.net/OneMinute
BTW, Duncan, this post’s title is completely misleading. Why does this turn users like me into Digg spammers?
“New service Collactive comes to the world courtesy of the Israeli outfit Blue Security”?
I’m familiar with some of these guys, and as I understand Blue Security was closed and people went their separate ways. This is a new company, new people (sure, some of the same founders) and new service. Why the connection?
I beg to differ. I think Collactive brings REGULAR users closer to Digg. I personally acted on a few humanitarian APB’s (The one Alister Mentioned included).
Thanks again for calling me a spammer…
I guess it’s slow news day…
I can’t see the difference between Collactive’s service and bloggers who puts a “Digg this” button on their own webpage. Mr. Riley might argue that these bloggers also encourage Digg spamming, because they make it easier to other people to digg only their own story (which is exactly what Collactive do — make it easy to digg/promote your own story).
Their (Collactive’s) website looks great, has anyone tried the service?
Joseph
My understanding is that it’s the same folks, new product but I’ve amended the post to reflect the team not the actual original company. Connection is simple: fight spam on one hand, create this on the other.
Alistair
if you’re using Collactive to get votes on Digg (and I’m not saying you are, I don’t know) then it doesn’t matter how morally correct the issue, you’re still trying to game Digg by using the service, and you’re therefore spamming Digg’s results. The quote from the Digg CEO via Alarm:Clock wasn’t made up, least that I know of by the way: DIGG IDENTIFY THIS SERVICE AS ATTEMPTING TO SUBVERT DIGG!!! Straight from the horses mouth, if you don’t agree with my analysis fine, but are you suggesting that Digg don’t know their own product? Read the quote.
I’m all for lessening the spam on Digg, but agree with Paul (above).
Duncan, I don’t understand what are you so angry about.
To me it seems like a service to make voting on sites easier for the less tech savvy.
It is useful for people which are interested in voicing their opinions, but are not interested with headache of manually registering to each site separately.
I agree with posters before that this is a powerful “Digg this” button, not a war on Digg.
@Duncan
Here’s the link to the original article on WSJ, so you can fix Digg CEO Jay Adelson’s quote.
http://online.wsj.com/article/.....02706.html
@Duncan
1. Why is it gaming Digg if I would have voted anyway? Their APB just made it much, much easier for me (and for my dad, who usually does not have the know-how to open accounts on all sorts of site).
2. I am not implying anything was made up, God forbid!
The original Digg CEO quote is on the WSJ article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/.....02706.html
Alarm:Clock quoted this sentence - “There’s a difference if you’re a marketing company and you want to get something manipulated to the top”. The “For sure… to another level” is an afterthought Alarm:Clock added.
You hate ketchup but love mustard. But you agree to vote up a Digg story on the joys of ketchup and in exchange others will vote for your mustard is tasty post. Aren’t you subverting the purpose of Digg and making it less reliable and interesting? Or as Mashable puts it: “it seems to me that social rankings weren’t designed to be controlled by a group of powerful lobbyists, even if they decide to use that power for good.”
alarm:clock - I don’t get your “in exchange” point? What is the exchange in Collactive? I create the APB and I am responsible to send it myself to whoever (or, in my case, I got it from an organization I am subscribed to). There is no “quid pro pro” system… that would be wrong!
Sequoia… who?
At the top of Recent APB’s right now is “The Ultimate Bikini Contest.”. it’s nice to see it being used for important causes.
Duncan, readers,
Today’s web is based on user-created content. I discovered that it is often hard to participate on these websites, the end result being that techies tend to set the online tone. What Collactive hopes to achieve is to let ordinary, non-technical people who care for something participate on websites, news sites and so on. Bloggers can use our APBs to easily reach and involve a larger sector of the Internet population.
As the creator of an APB, it is entirely up to you to share it with your friends, readers or supporters. Our website lists all recent APBs to give casual users an opportunity to find topics they find to be of interest.
I invite you all to try the service out, we hope you will all find it useful.
Regards,
Eran Reshef
CEO, Collactive
http://www.collactive.com/
Eran Reshef: “What Collactive hopes to achieve is to let ordinary, non-technical people who care for something participate on websites, news sites and so on.”
Phil: “At the top of Recent APB’s right now is “The Ultimate Bikini Contest.”
SUCCESS!!!
“Of course there is aside from a name that sounds like medication”. What’s that about, since when did Techcrunch turn into a sleazy tabloid? Jeez… can we stick to serious analysis please?
I am saddened by this. Bluefrog was a wonderful software and I was a supporter of Bluesecurity. They could have surely don’t a lot better.
i was browsing their test APBs, clicked on the “big yellow button” and got a prompt to install a “web assistant,” which would help me create a youtube account. when i demurred, a javascript popup asked me: “Are you sure you want to use YouTube on your own?” scary stuff, but i’m pretty sure i can handle it.
http://ws.collactive.com/point.....1Ar2oYwGji
How is this different than IMing 30 friends to Digg your story?
Who cares! Looks ethical to me.
Oh, and this is great too:
“The Collactive Campaign Manager is a hosted system that enables you (or your public affairs firm) to easily mobilize your group via APBs to take collective action on Web 2.0 sites. ”
http://www.collactive.com/enterprise.html
I wish we had a Web 2.0 ‘Do Not Call’ register to stop the onslaught of corporate PR spam this is intended to facilitate.
Nice one guys.
To catch the other side of this story (written well before this post) …read my take:
http://www.degardener.com/2007.....fining-it/
As I mentioned above (I’m comment #9) - I beg to differ.
On another note… how are they going to get users to vote for stories if the users don’t receive anything in return?
Subvert and Profit pays users, and that is why we have been successful. No VC required.
http://subvertandprofit.com
I don’t get what the big deal is either. It’s a Digg.com for all the Digg-like websites out there, an aggregator of content aggregators. As long as it’s real people freely voting up particular stories, then no harm done.
Where it gets gray is of course Collactive’s revenue model and how they plan to pursue it. If Collactive pursues a quid-pro-quo or fee-for-vote system like alarm:clock guesses, then they’s stepped into a gray area and I could see Digg+competitors shutting out votes originating from Collactive. But if a business pays to move to the top of Collactive’s voting pile, then it’s not any different than paying the extra fee to become a featured item on eBay.