Twimates And Their Illegal Tactics

There's a new service currently in pre-launch which is similar to Twiends that allows you to increase your Twitter followers and Facebook page likes.

This new service called Twimates (twimates(dot)com) uses hacking and other illegal tactics to harvest email addresses to send you promotional materials about their new service. They are also sending phishing emails using aliases asking for your Twiends account login information. They are doing this to harm the reputation of Twiends and to gain access to Twiends membership base.

How do I know this? Quite simply, after receiving a unsolicited email from them on the 19th May and replying to ask where they obtained my email address, their response was quite frankly, shocking. Here's a copy of their response:

"Hi Derek, I'm sorry if we sounded like spammers, but we really trying to help people out. We know twiends policies are making their users very unhappy so we want to build a better and more user friendly site. To be honest, we got your email from twiends. They have very poor security and we broke into sections of their site. Another reason why you should switch to a new and better service."

The phishing email was a bit more serious in that it was supposedly selling seeds and then asking for your Twiends account login information. The way they obtained email addresses for this was by visitors entering their email addresses on their pre-launch registration page.

I have spoken to Dave Sumter, the owner of Twiends concerning this issue and measures have been put into place to beef up account security on his system. I have also contacted the email marketing service and hosting company where the spam and phishing emails originated. Given the way they harvested the email addresses and with them posting phishing emails, this should give adequate reasons for these companies to act. In fact and while writing this post, I've had confirmation that both iContact and HostGator have already taken the necessary steps to prevent this from happening again.

So as a word of warning: Any new service that uses these kind of illegal tactics to obtain customers/members should be avoided at ALL times. Just be aware everyone.


Update 25th May 2011 at 9:34am:

I've just received an email from Twimates after they seen this blog post. Here's the contents of that email:

Dear Derek,

We know you've been contact by one of our staff. He has indeed used our email list and spammed the users that had pre-registered with his own offer of twiends seeds. This was no way affiliated with Twimates, we are a legitimate site and abide by all the TOS. He has since been sacked from the team, and we are continuing to develop twimates ready for the launch date on June 1st.

We apologize for any spamming created during this period and we want to let you know that we've put a stop to it. Please let us now if you could edit the very negative blog post you wrote about us or remove it. A proof that we are legit and we don't get our users by spamming is showing you advertising options that we've bought: http://www.twitdom.com. We are a featured app on that website and also have a banner at the top.

Best Regards,
Twimates Team

Unfortunately, whether it was one of their staff or not, they are STILL liable for this person's actions. Furthermore, advertising on twitdom only costs approximately $50...that's certainly a small amount to invest in advertising, especially if they're trying to prove their legitimacy to me. If I was in their situation, I would have provided more information to backup my claims.

Will this blog post be removed or amended as per their request? Given the hard facts, the admission of hacking into the Twiends site (which incidentally used the same vocabulary, email and IP address to the response email I received today) plus other information I cannot yet disclose, the answer is a definite no! Sorry Twimates, you've given us adequate reasons why nobody should trust you.


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Google Adds Site-Filtering Feature To Search

Ever wish you could keep certain sites from showing up in your Google search results? Thanks to a new feature being rolled out right now, you can.

Google announced the debut of a site-blocking search tool via its official company blog on Thursday. The tool is simple to use: When you click on a site in a Google search and then go back to Google -- presumably because you weren't satisfied with what you found -- you'll see a new option on the results page to block the site from future searches. All you have to do is click it, and the site will never show up for you again.

Your search site-blocking preferences are saved in your Google account, so you'll have to be logged in for the feature to work.

And don't worry: Your search-blocking changes aren't set in stone. Anytime a site is omitted from a search because of your blocking, Google will display a small message letting you know something's been removed. You'll have an option to unmask the hidden results, if you're so inclined. You can also manage your virtual blacklist via your Google search settings.

The Google search-blocking feature will become available to everyone over the next few days. As of now, it'll function only in English and only for users on Chrome 9 or higher, Internet Explorer 8 or higher, and Firefox 3.5 or higher.


Google Search Filtering: The Bigger Picture

If this whole thing has you feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry: You aren't losing your mind. Google announced a similar search-filtering feature about a month ago in the form of an extension for the Chrome browser. The extension did almost the same exact thing as this new feature, except for the fact that it worked on the browser-level instead of on Google's own servers.

It's all part of Google's steady efforts to combat the presence of search spam -- a fancy term for low-quality entries that show up in search results. Google has increasingly come under fire for search spam in recent weeks, with some bloggers and pundits saying the company's level of search-result junk is spiraling out of control. The concerns revolve largely around so-called "content farms," or sites that generate lots of pages with little real value. Many of these sites monitor popular search queries and create pages for the sole purpose of attracting traffic, even though they have no original or relevant content to offer.

Google also recently adjusted its search algorithm to try to keep those sites from cluttering up results. The change, announced in late February, is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites and give higher rankings to sites with more original and in-depth material.

Related Articles:
Google's New Content Farm Algorithm In Action


Many thanks to JR Raphael of PCWorld for the content of this article. If you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

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Google: Search Engine Spam On The Rise

If you've noticed lately that Google's search results are a bit spammy, you're not alone.

In a blog post, Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts acknowledged that "we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months," and that tech watchers are growing critical. Cutts then outlined a few new initiatives to improve the quality of Google's search results.

Among them: Google has a new "document-level classifier" that's better at detecting the hallmarks of spam, such as oft-repeated keywords; Google is improving its ability to detect hacked sites, which were a big source of spam last year; and the company is evaluating other changes, including a crackdown on Websites that primarily copy other sites' content.

But on the issue of "content farms," Cutts didn't have all the answers. If you're not familiar with the term, you've probably stumbled upon some content from purveyors. For example, many in the media call sites Demand Media and AssociatedContent content farms. Rich in search keywords and produced on the cheap, content from these sites appears prominently in search results but seem geared solely towards appeasing search algorithms.

Although Google tweaked its algorithms last year to give content mills less prominence, the problem hasn't gone away, and Cutts' blog post offered no further solutions. "The fact is that we're not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception," he wrote. "However, we can and should do better."

Cutts reiterated that Websites don't get preferential treatment by purchasing or displaying Google ads. Their rankings don't improve and they're just as likely to be punished for violating Google's quality guidelines.

I suppose it's comforting to hear Google address issues of search quality, especially as criticism grows louder. Notably, new search competitor Blekko has created a spam clock to count how many spam pages have been created since the start of the year. Google says its results have half the spam they did five years ago, but that count is meaningless if low-quality content mills are able to game the system and get high page rankings.

With Google co-founder Larry Page stepping up to chief executive, the pressure's on to improve search while cultivating newer ventures such as software and social networking. Hopefully Cutts' blog post is just the beginning.


Many thanks to Jared Newman, contributing editor of PCWorld for the content of this article. If you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

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Until my next post, have a great week!