I'm surprised more people aren't speaking against what you did... I guess people aren't too bothered about spam until it gets above a certain threshold, and I guess it's only Twitters money that people like you are wasting by abusing their services and breaking their T&C's
HN is the best response I've received compared to any of the other sites that this link was submitted to, to include Reddit and Digg. Two thoughts come to mind:
1. HN is where we just saw a thread where users posted about the most unethical things they've done to get a startup off the ground.
2. I think that many HNers could relate to me. I was a broke, down-and-out geek/hacker-type that came up with an idea and took it on for the technical challenge. And, hey, I made a few dollars off of it, too.
The only mention of spam I see in Twitter's ToS: "You may not interfere with the access of any user, including sending a virus, overloading, flooding, spamming, mail-bombing the Services, or by scripting the creation of Content in such a manner as to interfere with or create an undue burden on the Services."
http://twitter.com/tos
No mention of "unsolicited replies". Heck, for most early users, all @replies on twitter are unsolicited. Most of the time I have an exchange with someone before I follow them. Twitter's just designed to be more promiscuous than email. Anybody can see your tweets, so you're encouraging strangers with insight to jump in.
I think that makes what he did a grey area. Depends on how good his recommendations are, basically.
I'm honestly conflicted on this. On one hand, it's spam, as users are "receiving" messages they didn't solicit.
On the other hand, it's a kind of cool service, as an "enrichment" to twitter messages. If you could find some way of doing it for those who might find it useful without forcing it upon those who don't, I think this could be a great opportunity.
The reason most people aren't speaking against it is that spam is just a class of information with a low utility rate, whereas useful information is information with a high utility rate. Sufficiently targeted spam is therefore not spam, but useful information.
I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything.
I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.
So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance.
My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.
This is called cookie stuffing and it's not only against TOS but also fraudulent and very illegal. You're stealing money from Amazon. The owners of Digitalpoint just got charged with wire fraud for this practice. If ethics don't concern you, you should stop simply because of the low relative reward and high risk.
hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end up buying something.
All I can say is, nice work. It's creative. I've made some decent money off affiliate programs and twitter. What you're doing is similar in nature to what a lot of people are doing (human and bot).
We recommended these books based on the following terms:
schon, only, when, that
It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play into any ratings
Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it another shot and see how it works for you.
While I haven't seen any numbers, I think that there are alot of these bots. I have even less of an idea if any of them are contextual alot. Right before I was suspended, I believe that there was a report that came out that suggested that a large percentage of Twitter's traffic was caused by spam bots like these. I'll see if I can find the report and verify the numbers!
What I do know is that there are certain keywords that put you in line to be tweeted at for some product or website. Some keywords have more bots trolling the search API than others.
UPDATE: I wasn't able to find the report I was looking for, but I did find the following blog post. It contains a graph that shows that SPAM used to account for about 10% of Twitter's traffic. This number is now below 1%.
That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text ads).
It appears that Twitter is starting to move in this direction. I recently read that they now embed what they call "Promoted Tweets" (another word for an ad) in their search results. I'm wondering how long it will be before these start showing up in our timelines.
I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago.
Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.
They started out like "@{{user}} You should read {{book title}} {{shortened book url}}" but many people would take offense if the recommendation wasn't a very good one or the book touched on a sensitive subject (like weight.)
I had much better results with "@{{user}} Have you read {{book title}}? {{shorted book url}}"
Interesting idea (to suggest based on already written content).
Maybe it would be considered less "spammy" if it would be just semi-automated, i.e. more like an "expert system". Also, it it would work for popular forums like PHP BB or others, would greatly extend it's usage (so not just on Twitter).
That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some additional revenue.
Sadly, I lost my corpus some time ago so until I pull more data from Twitter (I've got a script doing this as we speak) the suggestions are going to be a little weak.
The book suggestions are faded unless you mouse over them - if you click on them, you will be able to see a description of the book (as provided by Amazon.) I'll experiment with different design elements to see how I could make this more intuitive. Any suggestions?
I have just added some stopword filtering until my corpus becomes more fully developed. Hopefully this will improve the results of the recommendations!
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
HN is the best response I've received compared to any of the other sites that this link was submitted to, to include Reddit and Digg. Two thoughts come to mind:
1. HN is where we just saw a thread where users posted about the most unethical things they've done to get a startup off the ground.
2. I think that many HNers could relate to me. I was a broke, down-and-out geek/hacker-type that came up with an idea and took it on for the technical challenge. And, hey, I made a few dollars off of it, too.
[+] [-] akkartik|15 years ago|reply
No mention of "unsolicited replies". Heck, for most early users, all @replies on twitter are unsolicited. Most of the time I have an exchange with someone before I follow them. Twitter's just designed to be more promiscuous than email. Anybody can see your tweets, so you're encouraging strangers with insight to jump in.
I think that makes what he did a grey area. Depends on how good his recommendations are, basically.
[+] [-] lukev|15 years ago|reply
On the other hand, it's a kind of cool service, as an "enrichment" to twitter messages. If you could find some way of doing it for those who might find it useful without forcing it upon those who don't, I think this could be a great opportunity.
[+] [-] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ritonlajoie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aspam|15 years ago|reply
I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything.
I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.
So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance.
My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.
[+] [-] il|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minouye|15 years ago|reply
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y10/m08/i11/s01
[+] [-] japherwocky|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ohashi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sukotto|15 years ago|reply
1) Directly related to something I just said I wanted
2) You never advertise to me more than once.
I wish more advertisers (or even spammers) worked this way.
[+] [-] rb2k_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it another shot and see how it works for you.
[+] [-] DotSauce|15 years ago|reply
http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yah...
[+] [-] ritonlajoie|15 years ago|reply
How many of these bots are spamming twitter already ?
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
What I do know is that there are certain keywords that put you in line to be tweeted at for some product or website. Some keywords have more bots trolling the search API than others.
UPDATE: I wasn't able to find the report I was looking for, but I did find the following blog post. It contains a graph that shows that SPAM used to account for about 10% of Twitter's traffic. This number is now below 1%.
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html
[+] [-] fno|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe-mccann|15 years ago|reply
Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerfhammer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
They started out like "@{{user}} You should read {{book title}} {{shortened book url}}" but many people would take offense if the recommendation wasn't a very good one or the book touched on a sensitive subject (like weight.)
I had much better results with "@{{user}} Have you read {{book title}}? {{shorted book url}}"
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xulescu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some additional revenue.
[+] [-] nowarninglabel|15 years ago|reply
I think the algorithm could use some work.
Also, the book suggestions are greyed out/faded. Makes me think there aren't any suggestions, you should make the icons come through in full color.
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
The book suggestions are faded unless you mouse over them - if you click on them, you will be able to see a description of the book (as provided by Amazon.) I'll experiment with different design elements to see how I could make this more intuitive. Any suggestions?
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mildweed|15 years ago|reply
Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.
[+] [-] hoop|15 years ago|reply