Here's yet another example of why I have a lot of angst for IntelliTXT advertising. Unfortunately, I've not activated my adblock or opted out for this site. Can you tell me which of these links are the real links to the relevant content about which this news story is written? It's about a new SDK from AOL for AIM.
The AOL link goes to AOL, at least, but the rest are all either to competitors or nonsequitors - "SDK" links to something about barcodes?! Oh, but when I look closer, I can tell that the actual site's links are in a non-underlined light blue style.
This is pathetic: There are more contextual ad links - which aren't actually well-contextualized - than there are real links. Oh, and have I mentioned the agency behind IntelliTXT has attempted to contact me through email and IM to discuss opportunities for decafbad.com? Do you know how much it pains me to simply ignore it and not turn around and spew pure bile at them? No thanks guys - I don't really want to offend you, but this service offends my sensibilities.
Archived Comments
Les, I'm not sure what ads you're talking about. Here's what that page looks like through my browser:
http://hybernaut.com/images/neowin-ss.png
The AOL stuff is interesting, too. I think it's much more than just an official API for gaim and Trillian--I've noticed Marc Canter disclosing that AOL is a client, so I think they'll be launching the AOL stuff with showcase modules fby Broadband Mechanics.
Brian: From your screen shot, it looks like you have a good set of ad blocking filters going on. I didn't, at the time. Ugh. :)
I'm still starting to dig into the AIM SDK stuff, though I'm not seeing what I really want to see - a spec of the TOC2 protocol. It looks so far like Win32 specific building blocks locked down with a developer key. But, this is only after about 15 minutes worth of looking over coffee this morning
Indeed--call me a heretic, but I can't read the Interweb without an adblocker. Every once in a while I look over someone else's shoulder and see all those blinking, animated ads and wonder, how can you possibly tolerate that?
But that's not really what you were on about, so I'll leave it at that. 8^)
OK, thinking about this a little more...
I haven't read their documentation yet, but what's your take on the wrongness of this? I mean, surely you can understand an API provider's desire to track usage and defend their service from abuse. But is the developer key model nefarious in some way that I haven't grokked yet?
Eh, no more wrongness than, say, Google's API. I'm just hoping for something more like Jabber - but then, I guess, I can just use Jabber. :) Expecting developers to use keys is AOL's perogative - I'm just happy to see more openness, once I can get a better look at it.