squared99

Well the site is now live. We pushed hard this week to get payment up through Paypal, and others to come soon, just waiting on verification. On top of that I had the mother of all colds, still do! Anyway, first step, a week to work out the major kinks(hahahahahahah ….heh) and hopefully make some sales.

The development continues now and we are getting real feedback from users. I feel about as confident as the rest of the mobile industry in determining capabilities, i.e. They don’t even know what the devices can do half the time thanks to the ‘branded’/'broken’ phone syndrome. Doesn’t help that these branded/broken phones don’t even send their UAprof etc, so much for device capabilities capture.

Until someone starts following some sort of standard, which wont happen til someone (consumers) puts pressure on the telcos, about the best approach will be to add these branded devices as specific model types, and add the capabilities as they are reported.

My best hope is that consumers will start to get educated on what service providers can offer as far as data access and migrate towards those that provide access to the richest content, which in turn forces the restrictive providers to open access to the mobile web and all the great services possible out there.

Ok, let’s see what happens….

Ran across this article and forum at Javalobby. Basically a sad tale of a them being pulled off of Google’s main index due to the fact that it got spidered during the exact time it was being slammed with forum spam attacks.

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t87997.html

Google is valiantly trying to keep garbage off its indexes, and appears to be implementing algorithms to drop or blocklist ‘splog‘ sites [wikipedia], which are springing up all over the web. They are used for everything from your typical porn and gambling, right up to political ‘grass-roots’ strategies. Unfortunately I think legitimate sites that get spammed on their forums may get in caught in the crossfire. Javalobby went from being flooded with traffic to dropping of the face of the web.

A couple of significant items emerge from this. One, it goes to show what a gatekeeper of the Internet Google has become. Javalobby saw a dramatic drop in their usual traffic once it was pulled of the main Google index. Perhaps we should call it Googlenet or Gnet?
Two, we are currently fine tuning the forums on voeveo.com, and at the moment we do not allow anonymous postings. Someone must sign up and sign-in first, we also use a little javascript/ajax mojo there which likely protects us somewhat, but as spammers get more and more sophisticated, this is likely not enough. We will have to implement further verification.

I had a conversation with RingFX, one of the guides on the site, about how a person who submitted a problem report to our forums; our only anonymous but highly controlled posting type, couldn’t anonymously post further comments into that topic. It is exactly because of this fear of spamming.

If this could have such an effect on Javalobby, a well-known site that has been operating for quite some time, imagine what an effect this negative Google rating could have on sites just starting out and attempting to climb up those Google search result rankings. Protection from these types of spam attacks needs to be added to list of must-do’s for all newly starting web site/applications, and spam counter-strategies will have to be utilized continuously throughout a site’s lifetime.

I’m already losing sleep over it ;)

Sorry for the radio silence, was swamped getting www.voeveo.com launched, then a quick holiday break.

We are still working hard to streamline the whole thing for producers so they can quickly and easily manage their content. Feedback so far has been great.
Workload should allow for regular posting here again, yay!