Friday Morning Links
My plane takes off in a couple hours and I still have not packed...here are some cool links Streamline and a few others sent me recently:
- Teoma - died :(
- PayPal going mobile - text someone a payment...that is what the company was originally going to do in 1999 until they fell into the lap of the huge eBay market
- Origami Project - MicroSoft led Ultra-moblie PC
- Wetpaint - easy wiki maker (for Gurtie)
- Firefox brought in roughly $72 million from Google
- the Problem with Global Warming - Seth prefers to call it "Atmosphere cancer" or "Pollution death" ... related to that topic Google's Norvig wrote The Global Climate Change Consensus: My Experiment and Reporters and Parrots
- Y! MyWeb
wow
you have a long memory :)
go already
Have fun this weekend.... and don't sweat it KidMercury will blog a bunch while you are gone ....
Curious about the Mozilla
Curious about the Mozilla revenues - is this entirely from paid search ads, or is user data being sold to Google?
Always been curious about the close Mozilla - Google relationship, especially considering Google's love of data, and Firefox's potential huge store of it.
what I read
I read that $72 million was from redirecting to Google's choice when the user entered a malformed URL on the location bar. That would be a commission on affiliate income, in a sense.
You are right on about that Google/Mozilla "closeness". Sure FF started as a tool to free the masses from the clutches of IE, but once Google offers them $72 million per year to redirect malformed queries to paid sponsors.... where's the benevolence?
Case in point:
I open FF and type in not a website but "weather report 98104" and I expect either a "no website" error or a redirect to NOAA.gov or perhaps weather.com. I can see past the affiliate revenue of weather.com provided it is a landing page for my zip code's weather. In that case FF is "helping me" and that's cool.
What I got was a real estate website for the non-specific Pacific Northwest, framing the NOAA website for weather in my area, with all data fields empty (NO DATA) and broken image links. The "real estate site" was nothing more than a header (which included a banner) and a left sidebar of links to various Pacific Northwest realty stuff. I did not check to see if they were aff links.
Did FireFox serve me, or cash in on my mis-use of the URL bar, by sending me to a poorly-executed spammy site with the help of Google (in exchange for $72 million per year)?
Give the huge success of that program, who can predict how else Mozilla (the for-profit entity) might monetize my use of Firefox next year?