Simpy Chichimichi

Wow -- I think I just made a serendipitous discovery! Tell your friends who work at Facebook and Amazon... email Bezos...

I wanted to go to Facebook and instead typed faebook.com. Note the missing "c". Guess what's hiding on faebook.com? You'd never guess! Amazon.com! Well, that is what I thought at first. I couldn't believe my eyes! Why would Amazon be playing such a dirty little misspell-a-popular-site-name-and-come-to-us game? A quick WHOIS lookup reveals this is really not Amazon's domain:

Domain Name: FAEBOOK.COM
Registrant [1003228]:
        Moniker Privacy Services
        20 SW 27th Ave.
        Suite 201
        Pompano Beach
        FL
        33069
        US

You can see that for yourself here. Amazon.com's record looks like this:

Registrant:
Amazon.com, Inc
   Legal Dept, P.O. Box 81226
   Seattle, WA 98108-1226
   US
   Domain Name: AMAZON.COM

You can see that for yourself here.

So what's going on here?!? Clearly, some scammer is trying to benefit from Facebook's popularity, people's tendency to make the same mistake I did when I typed Facebook without a "c", and Amazon's affiliate program. This is technically super-easy to do and this particular cheat is simply using HTML frames to accomplish his dirty little goal. He uses a frame that consumes the whole browser window to pull in Amazon's pages and thus appear nearly 100% like a genuine and familiar Amazon.com, the site where we've all shopped a million times and are likely to do so again, especially during this time of the year. I am sure neither Facebook nor Amazon will be pleased to see this. What is more, it looks like this scammer might actually be making decent money from this trick, or at least that's what Compete's numbers point to:

Well, maybe not a lot of money is actually being made there. Compete shows a very low number of pages viewed per visit, which tells us people leave the site very quickly. This makes sense - you don't expect to see Amazon's site if you were trying to go to Facebook. Thus, most people probably mumble WTF, re-type Facebook.com correctly, and leave Faebook.com behind.

This past Thursday was Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. This means people were eating turkey, cranberry sauce, (s)mashed potatoes, gravy, and pies. It also means that Web traffic world-wide was lower than usual.

I took the opportunity to make a few improvements to Simpy during this quiet period:

1. While spammers are still actively trying to post their links to Simpy, a lot of them are now hitting a dead end. Lots of them use automated tools, so it will probably take a little while for them to realize this. This change doesn't reduce spam, but it reduces the amount of resources used up by spammers, and that's a good thing for everyone but them.
2. Do you ever look at "Similar Users" section in your profile? I do. I have always been happy with how Simpy found people who are similar to me (e.g. see "Similar Users" in my profile), but I decided to make a little tweak to the algorithm that computes this similarity to see if it could be even better. The result: it is better - you will see better, more similar people on your Simpy profile now. Let me know what you think!
3. Better People Search! The side-effect of better similarity algorithm is a more precise People Search. Enter a few keywords/tags and you will find really good matches of people who know about whatever you searched for. Think of this as the window into finding experts on any given topic. For example, I co-authored a book called Lucene in Action. Guess who I find when I search for Lucene in Simpy? Erik Hatcher and Otis Gospodnetić -- the two co-authors of Lucene in Action!
4. Alphabetical sorting is coming! People have asked for this one, and it's ready. One of Simpy's servers is hard at work making the final changes needed for this feature as I type this. It should be done crunching early next week and then maybe the following weekend you should see this functionality on Simpy.
5. Another side-effect. Along with alphabetical sorting you will soon be able to slice your bookmarks by the starting letter of their title. In other words, you will be able to get all bookmarks starting with the letter A, all bookmarks starting with B, C, D, etc. My current plan is to simply provide a clickable "alphabet bar" above the list of your bookmarks: A B C D ... X Y Z 0 1 2 3 ... 9. The questions are: Should the result be sorting alphabetically within a letter? Or in reverses chronological order? Should limiting bookmarks by their starting letter be combined with search, so you can search within all bookmarks starting with a given letter? (I currently don't see a great need for this.) Please let me know how you would like this to work!
6. Have you created any Groups in Simpy? If you have, go edit them, make them public, make them open (let people join without an invitation), go add a nice, good description, add some good and relevant tags, and make sure you picked good names for your bookmarks. The searchable Groups Index is coming!

That is all for now. Please comment if you have feedback!