In Reddit’s continuing effort to weed out spammers, it has taken another not-quite traditional step: email verification.

Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further – email verification that is completely voluntary.

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Earlier this month, the social news and bookmarking site announced that it was going to be drafting its users in a form of crowdsourced spam filtering. This next step, it says, could make “the spammers’ job dramatically harder”.

From Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi’s blog post:

First and foremost, nobody has to verify their email address. If you’re paranoid about this sort of thing and would rather jump off a cliff than tell reddit your email address, you’ll still be able to log in, vote, post crazy comments, submit links to bunker supplies and tinfoil hat designs, and everything else that you’re used to.

In fact, we think (and hope) that normal, non-spammy users won’t even notice any change. The only ones who should have a problem are people who submit one crummy link after another, as often as the site will let them. We’re going to start limiting them to a certain number of crummy links per hour (and per day, per week, etc).

Schiraldi goes on to explain that “crummy” links are ones that are flagged as spam, fail to pass “deputy moderation” (that crowdsourced spam filtering me mentioned above) and links with more downvotes than upvotes.

So, if you surpass the number of crummy links allowed, all you need to do is verify your email address and “you’ll be granted a lot more leeway.”

It’s interesting to see these attempts at slight twists on traditional spam filtering because, as Schiraldi notes in the beginning of his blog post, “there are plenty of occasions when reddit users wish to remain anonymous” and “it’s a fine line to walk, crushing spammers without hurting [their] community.”

The IAmA is a perfect example. The name is a multipurpose anacronym, where someone says “I am a” but it also means “Ask Me Anything”. Without anonymity, this massively popular section of Reddit would be far less interesting, if not impossible.

Discuss

Last week, we wrote about the art of the elevator pitch, that short and hopefully impactful speech one should be prepared to give. But face-to-face interactions aren’t always possible, and even though they may be preferable, it’s important to practice the written form of the pitch as well.

Investors (and tech bloggers, I would add) are inundated with emails. As with an elevator speech, you need to craft your email to attract and hold your reader’s attention.

Here are a few tips.

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1. The subject line matters. Don’t leave this blank, and don’t write something vague like “introduction” or “pitch” or “idea” in the subject line. At least include your company name, but better yet include something that makes the email seem interesting to read.

2. Introduce yourself. Personalized emails go a lot farther than those sent from the marketing department. While attachments like resumes and press releases are sometimes appropriate, you should give a quick introduction to yourself at the beginning of an email. Your introduction should include the key details: who you are and why the recipient should know you.

3. Know your audience. Demonstrate some evidence in your email that you know who the recipient is. Make sure you are targeting the right person with the right message.

4. Pictures say a thousand words. If possible, include images and videos. These can help the recipient quickly assess your product or service. Be respectful of file size limitations.

5. Make it easy to reach you. Every email should contain a signature. And every signature should include all the possible ways to reach you: phone number, email address, Twitter account, Skype name, and so on. You need to be a click away.

6. Make it happen. Don’t just send emails with vague discussion about potential follow-up. Propose a follow-up. Arrange a meeting time and place.

As with the elevator speech, it is important to be yourself. Remember to be respectful, even though the interaction isn’t “in person.”

Discuss

When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you’ll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are "coming soon."

What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.

"The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle," says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. "The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format."

Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:

- public profile data
- pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
- a public key
- other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
- a URL to an avatar
- profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
- whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
- or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.

When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you’ll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are "coming soon."

What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.

"The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle," says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. "The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format."

Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:

- public profile data
- pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
- a public key
- other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
- a URL to an avatar
- profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
- whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
- or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.

If you’ve been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@readwriteweb.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command – WebFinger – for all Gmail accounts. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online

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Google began a small beta test of WebFinger in August 2009. Today, Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick announced that the company has now enabled WebFinger fall all Google accounts with public profiles.

Making Your Email Address More Useful

You can think of WebFinger as an email-centric cousin of OpenID. While OpenID associates your identity with a URL, WebFinger links your identity to your email address. WebFinger can store metadata about your account and make it publicly accessible. This data can include your public profile data, information about other services that are used by this email address, a URL to your avatar, or – if you choose so – a declaration that this address doesn’t have any metadata associated with it. The WebFinger metadata can also point to an alternative identity provider, which can be an OpenID server.

Currently, there are not a lot of user-facing projects that expose this data, but you can find a small demo service written by Google engineer DeWitt Clinton here.

Adding Value to Google Profiles

With Buzz, Google already put a lot of emphasis on Google Profiles and today’s announcement increases the value of these profiles even more. It’s important to note, though, that WebFinger is an open and free protocol, so any email service and identity provider can implement it. You can find more detailed information about the WebFinger protocol here.

Image Credit: Flickr user purpelslog.

Discuss

Update: This article is nearly a year old, but pretty much the same thing is happening again (or still). A number of popular music blogs have been removed from Blogger, some are saying without warning. When we covered this before, Blogger Product Manager Rick Klau left us the following comment (as seen in the comments section):

Hi – I’m a product manager on Blogger, and I wanted to clarify a few things. Google only removes content when legally obligated, and under U.S. law, we are required to take down content when we receive a valid DMCA notice. When we we do this, we send an email to the blogger using the address associated with their account and submit the original DMCA notice to chillingeffects.org. If a blogger wishes to challenge the DMCA notice, they can file a counter notice, at which time the original DMCA complainant has 14 days to file suit, or we will reinstate the removed content. The whole policy is explained in more detail here: http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html.

A good reminder for our users is to ensure that the e-mail address associated with their blog is valid and an address they check regularly; any DMCA-related notices we send are sent to that address. You can also find more info or ask questions in our support forum at http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help.

At Blogger Buzz, the official blog for Blogger, Klau says:

Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:

• Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
• Reset the offending post to ‘draft’ status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
• Send a copy of the complaint to ChillingEffects.org.

When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.

 

Original Article: Ryan Spaulding is a music blogger from Boston who runs the blog Ryan’s Smashing Life, which is hosted by Google’s Blogger. For some reason Blogger has been deleting some of his posts.

This story was unearthed earlier this month in an LA Weekly article that found the same thing happening to a number of Blogger users. I got in touch with Ryan to find out what he had to say about the situation, and the following interview is the product of that (Not all of Ryan’s opinions necessarily reflect those of WebProNews).

Chris Crum:  First off, can I get a little background on the story in your words?

Ryan Spaulding: Beginning last summer, I slowly began to notice that several older posts were beginning to disappear. This didn’t come to my attention for some time since I wasn’t in the habit of reading old posts except when I pulled down the material. Sometimes I received emails from frustrated readers who were looking for a topic I had written on – only to find the post deleted.

I had no reason to think this was anything other than a software glitch at first. There were no takedown notices or emails in my inbox. Then the instances began stacking up – and I began comparing notices with other bloggers. What was initially a series of seemingly unconnected blog post disappearances – by fall, became the topic of discussion in blogger emails and chat rooms. The change of tactic of the industry and the poor handling of  it by blog-host Blogger (Google) was being seen as a conspiracy.

I have come to love blogging and the integration of a myriad of software add-ons to the blog. Like the vast majority of bloggers, I am not paid for my time, creativity or passion. It is because of my passion for this thing that many of us have come to feel betrayed when we learn that the host of our websites is now in the business of deleting our posts without warning! (It’s an issue of respect. Blogger has proven that they do not respect their own users. Despite the merits of our prior good conduct and years of loyal use of their blogging platform and software – we are considered guilty before having a chance to demonstrate our innocence or at the very least have a chance to pull down the offending material.) Yes, it’s an issue of respect.

CC:  How many other bloggers have you spoken with that have had similar experiences?

RS: About a dozen or more to start, but since the piece ran in LA Weekly, I have received email from dozens more vocalizing their support.

CC: Can you tell me exactly what the deleted posts consisted of?

RS: The types of posts removed break down into two basic groups:

The Deletion of Unsolicited Promotional Posts: A few of these missing posts were "unapproved" posts on signed bands. This means I promote a band’s project and use an mp3 I had seen given away in other locations on the web, and then wrote lengthy pieces, breaking down the songs into their themes and reviewed them based on merit. All pieces were positive and promotional in nature. I tend to not write negative reviews on music;  it runs contrary to the underlying theme of the blog – to support musicians whose work I enjoy. While it hurt to see these posts disappear (why wasn’t I simply contacted to remove the material? ), ultimately I understood the rules about such things.

The Deletion of Solicited Promotional Posts (They Ask Me to Support the Band): What was truly upsetting was the loss of material that was approved by the labels and the bands themselves. Since I do very few Unsolicited Promo pieces, this is the lion’s share of posts that are deleted. This is at the core of the problem: More than a dozen of these at last count – each requiring four hours or more apiece – were deleted out of my account and without warning.

Google chooses it’s bed and makes bloggers lay in It. Blogger/Google had the opportunity to choose its tactic when receiving notices. First of all, they could have delineated between longstanding reputable bloggers and those suspected to be leakers. They chose not to do this. Blogger/Google treats everybody the same (the good and the bad!) –They also could have chose the tactic to notify the bloggers of the demand and let us comply. They chose to not take this tactic either and simply delete the posts. Later, they altered this tactic slightly by going ahead and deleting the post and then, later, sent an email explaining their position. The end result is the same. To illustrate how utterly frustrating this is, I will outline what takes place start-to-finish: 

I’m a choosy blogger. Each month, I receive many, many albums – both in the mail and through digital. These are always accompanied by a press release asking to promote the band, their album project and tour. In the case when the bands/music labels/PR houses/publicists ask me to use a specific post when I publish the material then I comply. I use the material they request. 

All of these steps serve to make me an authorized agent for the label. [I fully understand that I do not own the material and need to pull it down immediately if ever asked. This is implicitly understood.]

CC:  Have you contacted Google about the issue, and if so, what kind of response did you receive?

RS: They never responded. An "opportunity" (in legalese, of course) offered a means to have the post restored – but like most bloggers, I didn’t have the knowledge or time to fight "city hall" on every post. Especially, since Blogger/Google didn’t even take five minutes to send a simple email response. Nothing professional, nothing courteous. Again, the tactic they choose belies their basic lack of respect for their users – which is why I took up the cause. They have a relative monopoly on blog hosting services and rule with an iron fist.

CC:  Are you concerned that your blog’s reputation might be hurt when people click through to it from other sites, only to find that the content they’re looking for has been removed? How has the removal of these posts impacted your blog’s traffic?

RS: This is very hard to detect and prove. New people are coming in every day. But if you take a page out of economic studies, the value of "Opportunity Costs" are difficult to measure. If you are a first-time reader and you receive a dead link – you may never return.

CC:  Have you detected any loss in readership?

RS: Loyal readers were the ones to actually bring the deletions to my attention. I don’t think I could shake some of these people – they have truly become friends. But as with the prior example, some readers who have not been with the page long – predictably grow irritated at the absence of written material on the page when they repeatedly get dead links. And, they delete their bookmarks and go away.

CC:  Did you contact the RIAA? If so, what kind of response did you get from them?

RS: Actually, I firmly believe the majority of the posts weren’t pulled down on RIAA requests – the majority of these came through miscommunication at the label-level. The EU branch of the label doesn’t talk to the US labels. Sometime after the post goes live (with complete approval of the US label) the European branch contacts their legal department when they find the post promoting the band on my site. They choose to not recognize (or simply do not have visibility to the arrangement) and send an email to the IFPI (the British version of the RIAA). This group demands takedown from Blogger/Google.

I’d like to thank Ryan for taking the time to talk about this. Those interested in this story might also find Last.fm’s story interesting.

Update: Blogger Product Manger has weighed in on the situation in the comments section.

Just in case you were thinking Mafia Wars or Farmville weren’t a big enough part of your daily life, Facebook has announced that it will now offer email notifications from applications. Before you go diving off the deep end worrying about an inbox full of even more Facebook notifications, take a deep breath and remember that 80s DARE campaign slogan and let it become your mantra – “Just Say NO.”

In its blog post announcing the new feature, Facebook is careful to note that its users will retain control over who can contact them by email.

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According to Inside Facebook, our favorite social network will go one step further, offering users the ability to use a proxy email address, so they don’t have to divulge their email address to external entities but can still receive the notifications by email.

While this move is surely going to bring about calls of Facebook invading people’s privacy, we think that as long as no information is shared by default, everything should be okay. Then again, it seems that Facebook has moved in the direction of sharing things by default, doesn’t it?

What we really nope now, though, is that some of our friends don’t permanently disappear into the Farmville abyss as they are constantly reminded that the cows are coming home.

Discuss

The Wall Street Journal just ran a piece about the evolution of communication technology, chronicling the rise and alleged fall of email to social media. "Email no longer rules," the title reads.

Do you agree that email no longer rules? Tell us why or why not.

"We all still use email, of course," says Jessica E. Vascellaro, the author of the piece. "But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun."

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t all social networks also require logging on to use? Sure, you can set them up to remember your info so you don’t have to log-in every time, but the same could be said for most email services. That’s beside the point though.

It’s fun to look at how communication has evolved, and it’s easy to declare the old medium dead (although to be fair, Vascellaro didn’t exactly go that far). It’s just not the case.

WebProNews recently ran an article about how social media will not replace search, despite plenty of mutterings to the contrary. I will go ahead and declare the same thing about email. Social media will not replace email. Just as it did with search, it may replace it in some (even many) instances, but there is room for both forms of communication. In fact, they do a pretty good job of complimenting each other (for better or for worse).

Reasons Email Isn’t Going Away Anytime Soon

1. People still send hand-written letters via snail mail, even though they could instead make a phone call, send an email, text message, or status update.

2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address. Some are starting to integrate social media into this process (through things like Facebook Connect), but that is still a very small fraction, and they typically still allow for email information as well.

3. Email notifies you of updates from all social networks you are a part of (provided your settings are set up that way).

4. We haven’t seen any evidence yet that Google Wave really is the next big thing and will catch on on a large scale.

5. Email is universal, and social networks are not. Nearly everybody on the web (while there are no doubt some exceptions) has an email address. Many places of employment give employees email addresses when they begin working there. Meanwhile, a great deal of them are banning workers from even accessing social networks.

6. There are plenty of people who have no interest in joining social networks. Frequent news stories about security, privacy, and reputation issues do not help convince them.

7. Email is still improving. It hasn’t screeched to a halt with the rise of social media. There is still innovation going on, and integration with social media. Look at how Google is constantly adding new features to Gmail. Look at the new Yahoo Mail.

8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email. Never mind that they update users about community-driven happenings via email. MySpace (still one of the biggest social networks) even launched its own email service recently.

9. More social media use means more email use. Look at these recent findings from Nielsen. The people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email.

10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well, as many companies continue to struggle to find the right social media strategy to suit their needs.

Email Marketing

Let’s expand on that last one a bit. There have been a significant number of studies released in recent memory, indicating that email marketing is doing quite well. Epsilon shared some findings about how email marketing is driving offline purchases. The same firm also found that email open rates increased for the fourth quarter in a row (up 18% YoY according to the most recent study). Forrester Consulting and ExactTarget found that email marketing is the most popular channel for consumers. Earlier this year, Forrester Research reported that email marketing in the U.S. alone was expected to reach $2 billion by 2014.

Is the email landscape changing? Yes, without a doubt. Social media has become a very large part of the online lives for many Internet users. Earlier this year, social sites were even said to have surpassed email in usage. That said, Facebook has come significantly close to matching Google in terms of unique visitors, but that doesn’t make Google any less important does it? The two can co-exist, and so can email and social media. They are co-existing.

Email marketers are facing new challenges with an increasingly social and mobile web. For tips on embracing this, check out our coverage of a related session from the recent Shop.org summit.

Do you think social networks will replace email? Share your thoughts here.

Google has made some changes to the way Webmaster Tools users verify their websites.

Before, the user’s verification meta tag was based (partially) on the email address of their Google account, which meant that if they changed the email address in their account settings, their meta tags would also change, and they’d become unverified for any sites that used the old tag. Google has made a new version of the verification meta tag, which is unrelated to the email address to prevent this from happening.

Google has also changed the way it handles verification by HTML file. In the past, if a user’s site returned an HTTP status code besides 404 for URLs that didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be able to use the file verification method.

"A properly configured web server will return 404 for non-existent URLs, but it turns out that a lot of sites have problems with this requirement," explains Google software engineer, Sean Harding.

Google has simplified the file verification process, eliminating the checks for non-existent URLs. Now users can just download the HTML file Google provides and upload it to their site without modification. Google checks the contents of the file, and if they’re right, no further action is required.

"We hope these changes will make verification a little bit more pleasant," says Harding. "If you’ve already verified using the old methods, don’t worry! Your existing verifications will continue to work. These changes only affect new verifications."

Sites and software that have features, which help you verify ownership by adding the meta tag or file for you may need to be updated, Google says. The company also says it is working on further changes to the website verification process. In the future, they will begin showing the email address of all verified owners of a given site to the other verified owners of that site.

When it comes to Internet marketing, the money is in the list. A list is a collection of email addresses. The only ethical way to build a list is to utilize a double opt-in process. What this means is that when someone provides you with their email address, they receive a confirmation email making certain they intended to subscribe to your service.

The reason double opt-in is important is two-fold. First, there are unscrupulous people who will enter the email addresses of people they know and subscribe them to newsletters, offers, etc. that they have no desire to receive. This might be done as a prank or it could be done to harass someone.

By requiring a person to click on a link to confirm their subscription, they are stating that they have personally subscribed to your offer and do indeed want to subscribe.

Secondly, double opt-in offers some protection to you. Oftentimes people forget that they have subscribed to something. When they receive it, they mark it as spam or it ends up in the ‘Junk’ folder. If you receive multiple spam complaints, you could be blacklisted from sending out bulk mailings. If you use double opt-in, you can show proof to your ISP provider that the person, who claimed you spammed them, did indeed sign up for your newsletter.

A double opt-in system sends the confirmation letter the instant someone subscribes. This helps them to remember that they subscribed to your service. Once they click on the confirmation link, they will receive a second message letting them know their subscription has been confirmed.

When using email subscription services, you have the ability to include whatever message you would like. If people are subscribing to your newsletter, you would be wise to send them a thank you message and let them know when they can expect to receive your next publication. You should also include a link to the URL of your newsletter archive.

Capturing a Visitor’s Email Address

One of the easiest ways to begin building a customer list is to offer a free newsletter subscription. Chances are good that you have subscribed to an electronically delivered newsletter.

Newsletters are also referred to as ezines. Generally, they are sent to subscribers on a weekly, bi-monthly or monthly basis. A few newsletter publishers send out their newsletter daily. Daily newsletters generally offer a quick message such as a motivational quote or a business tip.

Generally, a newsletter consists of one to two articles; a ’soft’ advertisement; and links to information on your website or other beneficial resources. The content should be current and not readily found elsewhere.

When you publish a newsletter on a regular basis, you establish yourself as an expert in your field. You also keep your company name (or your own) in front of potential customers. When they need your services or products they will think of you because you have provided them with beneficial information and helped them solve a problem.

Keep in mind that most of the people who subscribe to newsletters receive dozens of newsletters each week. If you want them to read yours on a regular basis, you need to make certain that your newsletter stands out above the rest.

When composing your newsletter keep it concise and include beneficial information. Stay on topic and be consistent. If you tell your subscribers that your newsletter will be in their inbox each and every Wednesday; make certain that it arrives on time.

Do not use your newsletter as a sales letter. While it is okay to include a short ’soft’ advertisement for your product or service; the purpose of the newsletter is to provide beneficial information to the readers and keep your name in front of them on a consistent basis.

It’s a good idea to create a web page that details the information in your newsletter. When possible you should post each issue of your newsletter directly at your website. On the information page you can include links to each issue so potential subscribers can review what you offer.

You also want to provide them with an incentive to subscribe to your newsletter. You can give them a free report, ebook, or offer a one-time discount when they order a product from you. This incentive needs to be something that will benefit them.

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Byron Coke – In ‘The Honest Marketer‘ you will learn exactly how to build a loyal list. This valuable e-book will take you by the hand and provide you with instructions and resources to help you build a customer list in 90 days.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Building a Loyal Subscriber List

Spammers have found a new way to use Twitter. This one lets them harvest email addresses easily,  and use these addresses to do their dirty business. The good news is that you can avoid this practice by simply not tweeting your email address. Have other tips to avoid being spammed? Share them with WebProNews readers.

I was having a talk with Twellow’s lead developer Matthew Daines, and he pointed out that a simple query on Twitter Search can return large numbers of email addresses that spammers could potentially exploit.

"You can sit and just watch the email addresses steadily trickle in," he noted. "I wouldn’t doubt it if spammers are harvesting these."

Results for such a query might look something like this:

"It would be trivial to write a script that gathers these addresses," he added. "They could have several hundred thousand over a few weeks at the rate they trickle in."

The ability to search for email addresses has always existed on search engines like Google, but Twitter and it’s real-time updates brings a whole new element to the matter. They come in fast, and they’re always going to be up to date. This is why it could be enticing for spammers.

"The Twitter stream really weeds out all sorts of irrelevant data and cuts right to the email addresses within 140 characters, so it’s a lot less intense, and would require very little coding skill," says Daines. "The thing is this makes it just too easy to get email addresses."

Warren Riddle at Switched makes a good point about the threat. The retention rate among Twitter users has not been the greatest, and the potential for spammers to harvest users’ email addresses might turn some off too, although the ball is in the users’ court on this one.

Twitter may want to consider taking some kind of precautions to prevent this kind of abuse. Spam is already a huge problem plaguing email and the web. When a service continues to grow in popularity the way Twitter continues to do, such abuse should be a great concern.

The lesson here is: Don’t throw your email address in your tweets unless you want it to be searchable. That means it will be vulnerable to this kind of practice.

Some are probably thinking that this is common sense, but looking at the query that the above screenshot is lifted from makes it pretty clear that people are not really thinking about this. And if they are, they must not care.

Are you worried that spammers are getting your email address on Twitter? Tell us.

There have been plenty of complaints about Twitter spam, but what about spam as a result of our own tweeting? We have come to expect our Twitter streams to contain plenty of marketing messages (and perhaps the occasional worm), but some users may be unknowingly contributing to the spam that they find in their email inboxes.

I was having a talk with Twellow’s lead developer Matthew Daines, and he pointed out that a simple query on Twitter Search can return large numbers of email addresses that spammers could potentially exploit. Results for such a query might look something like this:

"You can sit and just watch the email addresses steadily trickle in," he noted. "I wouldn’t doubt it if spammers are harvesting these."

"It would be trivial to write a script that gathers these addresses," he added. "They could have several hundred thousand over a few weeks at the rate they trickle in."

The ability to search for email addresses has always existed on search engines like Google, but Twitter and it’s real-time updates brings a whole new element to the matter. They come in fast, and they’re always going to be up to date. This is why it could be enticing for spammers.

"The Twitter stream really weeds out all sorts of irrelevant data and cuts right to the email addresses within 140 characters, so it’s a lot less intense, and would require very little coding skill," says Daines. "The thing is this makes it just too easy to get email addresses."

The lesson here is: Don’t throw your email address in your tweets unless you want it to be searchable. That means it will be vulnerable to this kind of practice.

Some are probably thinking that this is common sense, but looking at the query that the above screenshot is lifted from makes it pretty clear that people are not really thinking about this. And if they are, they must not care.

Beginning today, people who sign up for YouTube will be given a Google account. Given that Google has owned the popular video service since 2006, it is a little surprising that this happened in the past, but it certainly makes sense that they would do it sooner or later. Note: I am not yet seeing an indication of this news on the YouTube sign up page, but I assume it’s in the process of rolling out.

It’s a smart move because it opens the door to other Google services that YouTube users may not have otherwise been privy to or taken the time to acknowledge. Things like iGoogle, Google Reader and Google Docs for example.

Really, the move could provide a tremendous boost to Google’s social media efforts, which it has seemingly been taking much more seriously lately. As I’ve discussed before (though I cited Gmail as the central point), Google itself has kind of been a social network for years, and many just haven’t realized it.

Now in recent weeks, they have put much more emphasis on the Google Profile, which is now showing up in search results, and offers the option of vanity URLs for easier visibility. YouTube has long been a huge social network (not to mention the 2nd largest search engine). Why not incorporate that more into the rest of Google? It’s arguably the company’s biggest and most well-branded social media entity.

Users can still sign up for YouTube with any email address, and they’ll still pick a unique username. "So why are we doing this?" asks James Philips of the YouTube Team. "We feel that by jointly connecting accounts, you can take greater advantage of our services both on YouTube and on Google, especially as we start to roll out new features in the future that will be powered by Google technology."

Those who already have a YouTube account but no Google account will still be able to enjoy YouTube just the same, but Philips says they will be rolling out features that will require a Google account in the future. Such features are not elaborated on, but I am very eager to see what these will be.

I would not be surprised to see a prominent YouTube link start showing up on Google alongside things like web, images, maps, news, and Gmail. There is already one for video that goes to Google video of course, but I have often pondered why YouTube would not be featured here. It’s obviously the more popular video engine.

When your building a successful affiliate business or any online business for that matter, one of the key aspects of your success or failure long-term will be if you are building a list.

It’s that important.

One of the ways to accomplish this is to have a Squeeze Page. This is a simple website with an optin form on it so that visitors can give you their name and email address in exchange for what some people call an “ethical bribe”.

Usually a free report, ebook or audio. Something that relates to the niche or topic.

This option form is connected to your autoresponder and it gets them subscribed to your newsletter or ezine. By doing this they are giving you permission to email them and start forming a relationship with them. You can have a set of emails ready to go out or at least a welcome email.

If they ever want to unsubscribe it is very easy for them to do so because at the bottom of every email should be a link.

So what makes for an effective Squeeze page?

1. There should be a strong attention grabbing headline in quotes. (I like to use Tahoma font in red)
2. A signature
3. Some bullet points of what they will recieve for opting in. (Whats in it for them) You probably don’t want more than about 8 bullet points.
4. Make sure the bullet points elicit curiosity
5. A strong call to action… “Just Enter Your Name and Primary Email address Below” (Tell them exactly what you want them to do.) If you don’t do this your prospect is likely to leave without taking the action you want.
6. Let them know that you will not spam them and that you will never sell there name and email address and stick to your promise.
7. Make sure there is nothing else for them to do on the page except optin. No other links should be on that page. It’s either optin or leave.

Once you get these basics in place you can test other things such as adding audio or video. Or adding your picture or other images. But again you want to keep it simple.

Make sure the copy on your squeeze page flows well and also include some power words.

To get an idea of what is working in your niche, do some research. Check out your top competitors squeeze pages. Get ideas from these and make a 2nd squeeze page and split test these 2 different pages to see which page gets the most optins.

You can use Google Website Optimizer for split testing. It’s free and can be a very powerful tool.

Oh, you will also need a web page editor. A good free one is Nvu. There are others out there but this is a good WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get).

So if you haven’t gotten around to getting your squeeze page up yet now is the time. The sooner the better so that you can start building that all important list.

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About the Author: Discover more Affiliate Secrets as they are revealed in the Free Affiliate Secrets Teleseminar series where you can hear secrets from top marketers such as Tellman Knudson,Willie Crawford,Ken McArthur, Tracy Repchuk and many more at http://InstantAffiliatSecrets.com Nancy Hults is a full time Affiliate Marketer and is helping others earn a full time income so that they can quit there J.O.B. She welcomes you to listen to all the free calls

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7 Squeeze Page Tactics For Building Your List