The Alexa vs. Statsaholic case - a wakeup call?

Alexa sues Statsaholic. The main claims are unauthorized use of their brand (Statsaholic used to be called Alexaholic) and scrapping proprietary content (Alexa's graphs).

You can read more about it here, here and here (or here).

Since Statsaholic changed its name prior to the sue and didn't really do anything to compromise Alexa's brand (in fact, it was building its business on top), the real issue is likely to be with the use of their graph data. Repackaging the graphs essentially makes Statsaholic a competitor with Alexa.

We see more and more Content Providers exposing APIs as a mean to charge for content or control usage and extent of 3rd party add-ons.

Alexa claims to provide an API from which one could build graphs by himslef. Technically it would have been very easy for them supply an API access for the graphs or settle a payment for Statsaholic's scrapping service.

So, on one hand there's good ol' businenss conduct in a competitive environment... On the other hand is that how we want the web to look like? Isn't that a good time to take a stand?

As we take a special interest with the case (LinkedInABox provides a better LinkedIn widget and use scraping technology for doing that), we have decided to contribute to the debate by empowering the people with technology.

What U Think About Alexa (aka WUTAA) features a sophisticated voting widget - throw a tomato! give a star! Upload a picture! read others opinions! Best yet, WUTAA is hosted on Amazon's S3 servers :-).

You are more than welcomed to grab this for your own blog. Just copy & paste the code bellow.

<embed src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/wutaa_files/wutaa.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="170" height="210" name="wutaa" align="middle" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br /><div><a style="'font-family:Arial;text-decoration:" href="http://linkedinabox.blogspot.com/2007/04/alexa-vs-statsaholic-case-wakeup-call.html">Get your widget</a></div>

Cleaning up the table

With some long due requests.

Privacy - too many "who are you guys and what the hell are you doing with my data", got us to put a privacy policy that goes to explain in detail how we deal with your data.
Yaniv is pushing for an "About Us" page... I still think that our boxes suffice for anyone who cares... we'll see who breaks first...

Connections - due to LinkedIn folks request, we've turned off display of the "Connections" bar by default. This is to emulate LinkedIn's current behavior that does not permit exposing ones connections to people that are not on the same network.

My network- this bar now provides a summary with current position&company, two predominate industries composing the connections pool and a list of people through which you are connected with the Box owner.

Favicon - now we've got ours.

Attention

Last week we got reviewed by SexyWidget, yesterday a small mention on TechCrunch and today with Steve O'Hear on ZDnet. Together with tens of other posts from people who seem to like the service, this is getting fun... :-)

Thank you all!

PS. If you quick enough you might still catch us on del.icio.us home page. Thanks again.

Platform support

Here's a quick hack that will enable you to have your box on Pageflakes.

1. On Pageflakes, click "ADD FEED" (on the top right)
2. Put "http://www.linkedinabox.com/pageflakes/" + box ID (the one you get by email once you register with the service. For example, my flake URL would be http://www.linkedinabox.com/pageflakes/1140586 )
   

That's it :-).

Update:
Thanks to Steve Purkiss, we now have a Drupal platform support! the instructions on how to embed the box on Open4.org are on his blog and a the Drupal module is here.

We've got few users requesting support for wordpress.com . If anyone from Wordpress is reading this, please drop us a line...

Update2:
Microsoft Spaces - after watching this guy doing it, we went and tried it ourselves. It works. When creating a box, just choose the MySpace/HTML only option and copy the generated code into Spaces HTML Sandbox Gadget.

Widget first

We've been told that we are the first widget to put out a different face when rendered to the site owner vs. site visitor (implemented on the "My network" bar).

Is that true?

Update:
And how about the "love me" buttons on the About bar?

...and some more features

This week we've been busy incorporating the latest crop -

Drop me a line - now you can receive e-mail from your visitors via the LinkedInABox service, without exposing your email address over the web.
(Being a LinkedIn dependent service...) we only allow LinkedIn users to send a post.
This enables us to include a reference to their public LinkedIn profile so you can use it as sort of "credibility" system and have a better understanding of who is the person behind the mail.

My network - when you invoke your own box in your browser, the box will display a private view(your visitors will not see it) of your LinkedIn account service: unread items, connection updates, questions and jobs on your network.

LinkedIn Public Profile - a link to your public LinkedIn profile, just beneath the box.

Added color

Today we've added the ability to choose skins for the box and add a background image (as my friend and Oscar-winner wannabe Yaniv demonstrates to the right).

If you already have the widget installed, you will need to go through the customization process again and copy/paste the new generated code.

Enjoy.

Oh, and one more thing - please check out the "Connected?" tab. Once you log-in with the service, it will automatically resolve connectivity level between you and box owners you will visit. Expect some more stuff to build on that...

News travels fast

Getting back from a long weekend (Yoga retreat, was just great :-), I had a bunch of news to deal with. Pretty exciting stuff (for us) to share.

Putting out LinkedInABox, we weren't really looking to make any press about it. We preferred baby stepping with friends & family while thinking what can we do in this space. From day one, it seemed to be getting some pretty good feedback on the idea and implementation but we have not figured out how to monetize it yet...

Last Thursday, Mashable made a small mention in his weekly roundup. From there, things rolled pretty quick leading to quotes on few news sites (like this nice Chinese site. I'm sure he gave us a rave review :-) and social link networks. We've also started seeing some interesting folks putting boxes on their blogs. I can't mention names, as people simply used it as a tool for their "private" use. However, one of them, Ouriel Ohayon posted a nice article about it, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind our referral.

It was important for us to get this widget out with minimum of investment so we can validate its core value first. Now that we've seemed to accomplish that, we'll be moving on to complete its set of features (oh, and work on that monetization part ;-).

If you have any suggestions or comment, I'll be more than happy to hear.