briancuban.com — The social site application of scripts and bots have been around as long as their have been social sites. There are scripts and bots available for MySpace, StumbleUpon, Facebook, YouTube etc. All have very different applications for very different purposes on each site. In 2007 MySpace was involved in a publicized battle with the commercial market
Sep 23, 2008 View in Crawl 4
macbookformeSep 23, 2008
I wasn't good at that, either:)
Closed AccountSep 24, 2008
there will be no bailouts for diggboss and others like him, bahahahahaha
bxrwxrSep 24, 2008
That.1,000 times that.
shadowspawnSep 24, 2008
"The thousands of users who do not abuse the system"While I agree the tone of the article could be better if neutral, that is a knee-jerk response.If you are given a system, and proceed to utilize it within the constraints provided by that system, it is not abuse.I know this sounds like a semantic argument, but as a systems programmer I hold this as a fact. Simply put if you do not want users to do something, make sure they can't do it. Otherwise they will.One cannot draw the line at an application that allows better interfacing when the boundaries are defined already within that system when that application was never predicted. That displays ignorance in the environment to which the system is exposed.The solutions on how to make a story popular are out there now, and the ways to optimize usage of the digg "algorithm" has been published.Since it's a political moment in time, you'll see use in ways that's amusing. You, for example, could make the front page mirror the drudge report with only 30 minutes of setup and explanation, then wait a while.Is that "abuse", if the system allows it to happen? Again, an age-old argument with the same colored hats.The problem, it's easily solved; yet it goes against their business model. Some take this to extreme. It could be said that digg.com has been "hacked".Programmers have a way of exposing that quite quickly in this day and age.