This morning brings another cautionary tale for anyone trying to build a Website or a business using data from another site. Visual search engine ManagedQ is broken right now because it took images of Websites from another visual search engine, Snap, without permission. (See screenshot above). Sound familiar? Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) ran into similar trouble with Amazon a year ago for taking graphs from Alexa before they were officially available through its API (read more about that dispute here).

It is unfortunate that Snap effectively disabled ManagedQ, which is run by a few programmers out of a basement in Palo Alto. But it goes to show that just because data is becoming more freely available on the Web, you still have to be careful about building a business on another company’s data. It appears that ManagedQ based its visual previews entirely on Snap’s images. As I wrote in a review last month:

Every time you do a search on ManagedQ, a grid appears on the right of the first six results so you can visually see what is on the other side of what is normally a blue link. If you click on one of the images, it opens up a larger, browsable window still within ManagedQ. The idea is that you can surf the Web without leaving the search application.

The way ManagedQ was using the images violated Snap’s terms of service (TOS), according to Snap CEO Tom McGovern. Snap does distribute these images through its Snap Shots widgets. (We use them on TechCrunch. If you mouse over any external link in this post, an image of the Web page on the other end will pop up). After coming across the site, his engineers figured out that ManagedQ was taking the images from Snap without any attribution or link, and cloaking the fact that it had done so. After contacting ManagedQ and not getting a response, McGovern ordered his engineers to block the site’s access to Snap’s images. Warns McGovern:

Folks really need to use services per the TOS. Otherwise they will go the way of ManagedQ or Alexaholic.

Ouch. At least his engineers didn’t replace the Website snap shots with goatse images. But the reaction does seem a bit harsh, especially for a tiny site like ManagedQ. Was McGovern justified in his response? Here’s what ManagedQ looked like before:

Update: ManagedQ founder David Stat has provided the following comment on their shutdown at the hands of Snap:

As we’ve been developing ManagedQ, we looked at several different
thumbnail services and decided on Snap due to their speed and high image
quality. ManagedQ is an experiment with visual Search, not a high volume
Search site. As such, we believed that Snap would not mind our use of
their service and may even encourage its novel and interesting
application. Before using Snap for our site, however, we performed a
traffic analysis and found that ManagedQ would consist of only about
0.01% of Snap’s traffic at most - hardly a share that would affect them
in any meaningful way.

It is most unfortunate that Snap has decided to block us, but I
understand that they are perfectly within their rights to do so. We did
not, however, receive a notice beforehand. We would certainly be
interested in pursuing an agreement with Snap that is outside the bounds
of their normal TOS, but we haven’t yet done so because we thought
ourselves too small for them to consider such a partnership.

Our focus is on continuing to create a new Search Experience with broad
appeal. We believe data should be open by default. We are at a loss
as to why a relatively big startup like Snap would feel threatened by a
small Search experiment like ManagedQ.

Update 2: Snap CEO Tom McGovern has also added these remarks to the situation:

We want sites to use the service in an unadulterated manner where the
actual Snap Shot is shown. There are lots reasons (server load,
business model, end user confusion) that this is important to us. For
developers that are working on a project or offering a commercial
service there are many other companies that offer a developer API
(Girafa, thumbshots, Alexa).

Tomorrow Photobucket is finally rolling out smarter way to tag your photos. If you've ever used Facebook's system of tagging other people that lets users draw a box around their friends, Photobucket's new implementation isn't too far off. You simply need to draw a box around any people or objects in a photo and give it a tag. Users who see the photo can mouse over the shot and get little boxes that denote the tagged area--similar to Flickr's notes feature. You can also add URLs that will jump users off to someone's social networking profile or other related links if they're one of your Photobucket contacts.

The service supports up to 20 names and links per photo, which is a far cry from Flickr's limit of 75, but likely more than enough to meet the needs of most users--and plenty enough to fill a shot. Like normal tags, the new inner-photo version will get added to Photobucket's existing pool of tags, meaning you're not going to have to tag a shot twice. Users will also be able to search by tag through Photobucket's search tool.

Like Facebook, when adding tags you have the option to e-mail anyone who has been tagged to let them know they're Internet famous. The real killer app however, is the fact that the tags will come with the photo no matter where it goes, a lot like that cool 2view service that I checked out in April. In their demo of the service Photobucket is showing off the new feature on a MySpace profile (imagine that), but it will work with any social network that lets you embed. I can see some cool uses come out of this for blogs and personal Web pages, although the only negative is that Photobucket embeds a big "get your own" link below each photo to advertise the feature to others.

I'm a huge fan of Facebook's tagging feature, and I've always enjoyed Flickr's notes, so to me this seems like a perfect blend of ideas from both of those services into one package. The fact that you can take it elsewhere should make things a little more interesting and add context to a shot, even if there isn't a proper caption, title, or description.

If you want to play with the new feature, Photobucket will have a demo available around 8 am EST at this page: http://tagging.photobucket.com

Tag individual parts of shots with Photobucket's new advanced tagging feature. You can even notify people to let them know, and add URLs like Flickr's notes feature.

Just over a month after releasing Widgetbox's App Accelerator, a shortcut for turning blogs and other Widgetbox widgets into Facebook apps (review), Widgetbox announced an upgrade that enmeshes its apps more completely into Facebook profiles.

According to Widgetbox, creating a functional Flash widget that lives in and operates from the user's profile page was the top developer request. It was mine, too. I wrote that:

"Most Facebook applications launch in a separate window when you click them, taking interaction off the user's profile page (the Facebook-developed Wall is a notable exception). It is therefore tragironic that my Webware blog, whose sole purpose is to make reading headlines instantaneous, never graces my Facebook profile page, and instead is stationed one click in."

Now, however, users have the option of creating new Widgetbox widget-apps in Flash, which means that they'll fully integrate into the profile rather than run in JavaScript on a rerouted page.

To sweeten the deal, Widgetbox has also dangled the golden carrot of customization. Users can now access two areas in the Facebook app-creator to finesse the app's appearance and to craft the profile's story feed and the invitation for friends to join. These dubiously named "viral settings" offer more control over the app's tone, but require a little bit of actual code development, unlike the previous App Accelerator process that required only copying and pasting links. To lighten the burden, Widgetbox lists the syntax and a menu of values for you to emulate when customizing your news feed. Tailoring the feed and invitations' look and feel brings the experience much closer to that of an organic Facebook developer.

People search engine Wink, the less bubbly but more filling competitor to Spock, is adding an interesting antilibel feature. Now, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result you don't like, you can ask Wink to ignore it, and when other people search for you they won't see that result either.

You can delete feeds, results, and pictures from Wink search results.

It's a very useful feature--providing people are searching for you on Wink. While you can get that embarrassing party photo removed from the Wink results, it will still show up on Google. Wink CEO Michael Tanne makes two points regarding this. First, he says, about one third of the 3-billion-plus people searches done each month are now done on people search engines, with the other two-thirds split between general search engines and social networks. Wink is not a major force in people search yet, compared to online phone books, but it is making headway. Second, Wink results show up, to varying degrees, on general-purpose search engines. Tanne told me Wink results show up fairly reliably on Yahoo and that his team is working hard on Google optimization. So the upshot is, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result or two you don't like, it's a good idea to "claim" your identity on the site and ask it to exclude those results. It can't hurt, and over time, it might help.

Wink also has some other new and interesting features. The most out there is a message board for people who haven't yet used the service. It works like this: Say you find an old friend via Wink, in a Web story or something, and you want to contact them. You can post a message to their name, and it will lie there waiting for them. If and when the person logs into Wink and claims their identity, they'll see your message. Tanne agrees this is a "last-resort" method for contacting people, but it's a clever idea and if Wink integrates with other social nets through OpenSocial, it could become a useful way to leave little message bombs around the Web for people you haven't communicated with in a while.

Finally, Wink now has a feature that lets you "friend" people and follow all their activies in a feed much like the Facebook "wall" and Plaxo's Pulse. By the way, Both Wink and Plaxo offer a widget that will you can use to tell people what you're doing online. Wink's only shows where you have accounts, though: Plaxo reports actual activity, such as Twitter updates.

Wink is working on an OpenSocial implementation, which could be very powerful. Conceptually, using Wink as an aggregation point for your social network activities makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to see what the crew comes up with.

My takeaway: Wink is worth using as a people search engine. It's also worth taking the time to claim your profile and edit out all the stuff about you that you don't like.

Finding potential business clients is easy on the internet. From Jigsaw (our coverage) to ZoomInfo (our coverage), new services provide a wealth of contact information you can use to reach into the bowels of companies, from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to a manager of an Arkansas Wal-Mart.

Finding and winnng a great new client is more difficult. Just possessing an email or phone number doesn’t guarantee that the person on the other end will be interested in talking, or be a promising customer.

Evan Sohn started Salesconx to provide fewer, but higher-value new business contacts for people who will pay more for quality. It’s the equivalent of targeted advertising, which increases the likelihood that the people who see the ad will respond, and in exchange raises the rates advertisers pay per thousand views of the ad.

It’s a small, exclusive social network for people who want to use, but also want to protect, their business contacts. For example, say you’re a salesman with the CEO contact mentioned above, but you don’t want to drop their info onto Jigsaw. The information is worth something, but so is helping the CEO — so if you introduce a new person, you’d better introduce someone worthwhile.

On Salesconx, the emphasis is on finding the right new person. First, you’ll start an auction for the information, with a fixed price (generally around $100). The price stays the same; instead of picking the highest bidder, you’ll be able to glance over the credentials of various bidders and pick the best one. Once the sale is finalized, you’ll make a personal introduction between the buyer and your contact.

Sohn says his site is for the “ground troops” of business — the highly engaged sales people and small business owners who benefit from intelligently networking. Contrast its method with Jigsaw’s practice of opening all of a user’s contacts to every member, a practice many think is abusive of business relationships.

The company launched a closed (alpha) testing of its product two months ago, and has several hundred professionals actively using it, Sohn says. Users include sales people and partners at businesses like design and law firms, who need to secure quality leads.

However, the service won’t explode into growth. It can’t, because most new members come through referrals, and all are given a phone interview about their professional background before acceptance. And once they’re on, the site continues to protect against bad apples by holding money in escrow until both parties are satisfied, and allowing members to give dishonest or ineffective sellers bad ratings.

The entire process requires extensive investment of time and capital by Salesconx — a nearly unheard-of move on the Internet, where most startups strive to automate as much as possible, keeping costs low.

Sohn says the investment is worth it because each lead generated on Salesconx is worth much more than a random name pulled off a site like Jigsaw, thus returning a higher cut to his company. He compares the service to business networking events that took place more often before the Internet era.

The site will be highly successful, and generate a large profit, if it can hit 50,000 active users, according to Sohn — again, far smaller numbers than most other sites require. It has so far picked up 719 members, as of this writing, in limited alpha testing, and is launching into beta today.

Salesconx is funded with about $500,000 from Sohn and several angel investors. It’s in the process of raising a venture capital round.

Venture funded UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge is unveiling a demo of its private beta today and looks like an interesting site to watch. One cannot help but think of the still-unlaunched Powerset, but it's also reminiscent of the very real Ask.com "smart answers".

Though the video the company published this morning speaks quite well for itself, the gist of what's happening is this. TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions. Instead of just pointing you to web pages where the search engine believes it can find your answer, it will offer you an explicit answer and explain the reasoning patch by which that answer was arrived at. There's also an interesting looking API at the center of the product. "Direct answers to humans and machine questions" is the company's tagline.

It sounds very interesting and I'd love to get my hands on it. Unfortunately, the company isn't allowing general access to the site and hasn't given me a login yet either. I hope it's real and really performs as advertised. It takes a very special technology to get coverage of a screencast and coverage again of an actual product release later. This might be one of those technologies. With the sense of self-importance that's implied by the act of unveiling your private beta to the world, one hopes there will be some meat here.

Founder William Tunstall-Pedoe says he's been working on the software for the past 10 years, really putting time into it since coming into initial funding in early 2005. Hopefully there won't be a Powerset style wait for the actual product. Keep an eye on our network blog AltSearchEngines for coverage of TrueKnowledge and the rest of the search engine world as soon as information emerges. See also Alex Iskold's excellent write up on a top-down approach to the semantic web and our coverage of semantic app Twine.

The New York Times reports that a study by security firm Barracuda Networks, which polled 2,400 of its customers, has found that more than half block access to social networking sites from employees on their work networks. Interestingly, though, MySpace was blocked far more often than Facebook.

43.9% of companies block access to MySpace, while just 25.6% of companies block access to Facebook. Just 6.3% of companies blocked only Facebook while allowing access to MySpace. Why is that? A snap analysis might lead one to think that companies are just more comfortable with the more orderly nature of Facebook -- and the fact that it is being used for legitimate business networking by some folks (myself included) -- whereas, the vanity-focused MySpace has no work value. But that's not what's going on here, according to Barracuda.

"Anecdotally, it just appears MySpace is better known," Barracuda’s chief executive officer Dean Drako told the Times. "Some of our customers didn’t know what Facebook was." Even though we recently reported that MySpace as a trend is cooling off, search volume for the site still crushes all other social networks, and news mentions, according to Google Trends, are still in line with Facebook. It's certainly not inconceivable that a lot of corporate IT types just haven't yet heard of Facebook (though that can be hard to imagine while operating in a blogosphere that mentions the site 12 billion times per week).

Image from Barracuda Networks.

In general, though, Barracuda thinks that more companies will begin restricting employee web access in the future, as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are seen as a productivity drain. The good news for me, is that playing around with those sites on a daily basis is something of a job requirement. For most of the rest of the working population, though, I've always thought that lost productivity numbers might be based on slightly fuzzy math. In my personal experience, even when there weren't any fun diversions (like Facebook) at office jobs I have worked, it didn't mean I spent all that extra time working -- it just meant the breaks I took were spent doing things like folding an arsenal of paper table-top footballs.

Similar to the way the recording industry can't legitimately claim that every downloaded song is lost revenue because not all of those downloaders would have made that purchase if downloading hadn't been available, companies can't make the claim that every minute spent on a social networking site is lost productivity because not all of those employees would have spent those minutes working.

Every March in the US there are stories run in the mainstream media about how many billions of dollars will be lost while employees fill out brackets for NCAA basketball tournament pools at work. But is the twenty minutes it takes most people to fill out a bracket time diverted from actual work or from goofing off that would go on anyway? Is goofing off even such a bad thing? Who is more likely to put out quality work, the employee that spends 8 hours straight working, or the employee that works 6 hours, and keeps sane by having a little fun along the way?

Forbes Media has finally acquired Clipmarks. The acquisition that was first mentioned a few months back has officially gone down. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Clipmarks CEO Eric Goldstein will remain in his current position, heading up the company.

The integration of Clipmarks will be used as an added feature for Forbes’ online news content, in what looks to be an internal implementation of Clipmarks’ technology. I imagine with a full acquisition of this sort, the clipmarking tools would be offered to end users and frequent readers of Forbes’ content across its online network.

We’re seeing more tools being extended to users from publisher sites, for printing purposes or retention purposes, and I think that Clipmarks would tie in to most individual and personalized needs that the publisher would offer, whether this is associated within its own social network or through third party applications or Clipmarks’ network itself.

And speaking of Forbes’ network of online content, that’s not the only web property that Forbes has gotten its hands on. The company has acquired a 51% stake in RealClearPolitics, for an undisclosed amount. The political website’s founders well remain owners and continue to manage the site.

The website is primarily an information hub for the occurrences of the political world and its current events. It will be joining the Forbes family of publishing websites for travel, autos and investing. The acquisition of a large chunk of the company’s stake is prime time, as the elections near.

It will be interesting to see how the major media companies as well as startups will continue to take advantage of 2008 as an election year, and holding a portion of that built-up audience for the next 3 years. The past year has been key for the distribution of information regarding politics, and some campaigns have even been built on this level of web integration.

As US sanctions against the Islamic Republic increase, Yahoo and Microsoft have removed iran from the country lists for their webmail services. You’ll still find Iran as an option for Google Gmail, though.

With more pressure from US administration on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government, there’s a lot of tension between the two countries right now, and this makes it more difficult for companies like Yahoo and Microsoft to comply with the restrictions being brought forth by Iran, and in compliance with the US sanctions they can no longer operate in Iran.

The details of these constrained business practices were not disclosed, but Google has said that the sanctions don’t keep it from including Iran in its country list and insists on its own compliance with US sanctions. This is all in addition of the fact that Iran is pretty vigilant in regulating Internet access for certain websites like, Facebook, already.

So why have Yahoo and Microsoft removed themselves from Iran while Google remains? Considering the amount of trouble Yahoo got into with the government in the past week, it’s not surprising that it’s taken the sanctions seriously. And any avoidance of stressing the already tense situation may be due cause for Microsoft’s light treading as well.

CNET has made an acquisition today, purchasing FindArticles from its parent company, LookSmart. The acquisition totaled about $20.5 million. With its online resource archiving approximately 11 million articles from 3,000 sources, FindArticles is a search tool that dates back nearly 10 years to 1998.

As LookSmart’s primary consumer service, FindArticles was an important part of LookSmart’s suite of online properties. But as we saw less than two months ago with the phasing out of WiseNut, LookSmart seems determined to trim down its services in order to focus on its core advertising network and publisher service operations.

So what’s got people scratching their heads is the fact that CNet, which has also been in the process of refocusing its direction with the selling of Webshots for $45 million, has taken on another large acquisition. Perhaps this is part of Cnet’s attempts to enhance its core structure, as an online resource for information. Not to mention, FindArticles has a very high SEO value for Google and other search engines, so this is likely a major consideration for CNet as well.

As IAC goes through its own restructuring, the changes going on at CNet and other companies like AOL emphasize the shifting, weeding out and return to core competencies that many are currently experiencing.

As has been reported previously, AOL, part of Time Warner, has bought New York/Israel-based ad targeting provider Quigo, for an undisclosed sum, though previous reports have pegged it at around $300 million. Reuters (NSDQ: RTRSY) reported earlier today that the price was around $340 million.

Quigo's two main ad serving products include AdSonar, which is similar to AdSense in terms of providing targeted placements on websites and through searches, and FeedPoint, a search engine marketing tool. Quigo has raised $45 million since opening its doors in 2000. The bulk of the investments, about $30 million, has been secured over the past year from existing backers, including Steamboat Ventures (Disney), Highland Capital, Leon Recanati's Glenrock Ventures, IVP and Meritech Capital Partners.

Quigo will be the fourth ad company AOL (NYSE: TWX) has acquired in 2007. Earlier in the year, AOL acquired Third Screen Media (mobile advertising), Adtech AG, an ad serving platform based in Frankfurt, Germany, and Tacoda, the behavioral targeting company. All of them roll into Platform-A, AOL's recently announced ad platform division.