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Ok serious question... What do people feel about url shorteners doing this? Also, what about free twitter clients - as a mechanism for monetization?
Ok serious question... What do people feel about url shorteners doing this? Also, what about free twitter clients - as a mechanism for monetization?
Ooh, wait, I can do one better: I'm telling Amazon. (Anybody with me? A
plurality of e-mail speaks louder than one.) This is in strict violation of
the Operation Agreement for the Associate program, which forbids attempts to
hide links, links being processed through redirects, failure to disclose use
of the Affiliate program, and tampering with other Affiliate links without
disclosure.
Assuming that you're asking about stripping affilate ids and replacing them with your own, then that's a shady, shady business and I wouldn't touch any VC with a ten-foot pole that would fund you that idea. How would you even propose to grow such a business seeing as you're in clear violation of the terms of the programs you would be relying on for revenue? It would be like proposing a startup where you hire ex-cons to mug people nightly in parks nationwide for a cut of their 'earnings.' Would you really think that such an idea had any thought put towards the future of the business?
If you're talking about pattern-matching URLs and redirecting to the wrong site (e.g. DownByTheBay.com -> eBay.com), then that kind of breaks the idea of a URL shortener. The shortened URL is supposed to take you to the location of the full URL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The issues you describe were caused by some new LiveJournal code which produced these unexpected effects." I'm not sure how any of that could really and truthfully be "unexpected."
It was the backlash that was "unexpected". As usual.