Amazon Watcher Auto-Orders Items When They're In-Stock [Shopping]
Amazon Watcher [via gHacks]
Monday, July 28, 2008
Click to Call Dials Calls from Your Browser [Featured Firefox Extension]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/347771515/click-to-call-dials-calls-from-your-browser
GrandCentral Click to Call Add-on for Firefox [That Smith]
Meet Moondo, Multiplayer, Multi-game Network
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/347551371/
Since it’s free to play, Funtactix CEO Sam Glassenberg tells me, the company plans to make money through virtual item sales. Moondo’s a fun idea with potential stickiness, especially for young teens, but I strongly suspect the site’s somewhat odd cartoonish graphics will turn off older players, as will the 85 MB client install (though a web version is planned for October.)
Want to Buy Xdrive? AOL Is Trying To Sell It For $5 Million.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/346840985/
It is a sad ending for Xdrive, which now will be best known for giving birth to MySpace (both Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe worked there). In an e-mail to staff explaining why AOL is powering down Xdrive and other businesses, EVP Kevin Conroy explained (bold added for emphasis}:
The changes described below are in no way a reflection of the hard work and creativity of the people who built and maintain them.
- Personal Media: Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures will be sunset. These consumer storage products haven't gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation. We have found that building media management applications within the context of a social experience is a more rapid and effective way to grow the business. For example, today the Bebo audience is uploading over three million photos per day. To effectively grow the XDrive online storage business we would need to focus on subscription revenues vs. monetizing through advertising revenue, and this business model is not in strategic alignment with our company's goals. We are exploring plans to migrate our users assets to ensure the best possible transition experience.
Subscription businesses are so AOL, circa 1999.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Who Is Johng77536 And How Did He Game Twitter?
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/347691796/
One of the reasons Twitter is such a useful platform for publishing is that it is largely spam free - you only received messages from people you choose to follow. So even though a large number of spammy accounts have appeared on the service, the only real damage they do is when they trick people into following them (a lot of people just auto-follow whoever follows them as a courtesy).
Recently Twitter has tried to raise the bar even higher by removing accounts that appear to be trying to game the system. A lot of spammy accounts are just being deleted.
But what happens if someone finds a way to get others to follow them by exploiting some vulnerability in Twitter? The service would be overrun with spam overnight.
That appears to have happened today - I, along with 7,000+ other people, are now following user johng77536, even though I never hit the follow button (the account is following zero other users). The account, which is just two hours old, is now one of the top 100 Twitter accounts (it is currently #63), and growing fast. There are two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com.
This is the first time we’ve heard about Twitter being exploited in this way. Our guess is they found a vulnerability in the API and are going to push this for all its worth before being shut down. We’ll see how quickly Twitter responds.
We did a search for the username and came up with this link, where a user with the same name purports to be John and/or Lena Granger (who may well have nothing to do with this).
Update: Per the comments below, it looks like the vulnerability is being used for at least one other account (image), which links off to the same hotmoda site.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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