Who are you and what have you done with Twitter's Fail Whale?

A Handy Guide to Figure out where you stand on Affiliate-Link Pinterest Bots

This post was triggered by the case of the super-successful Amazon Pinterest bot wrangler and the resulting discussion on HN.  In case you don't already know the background, here's a summary: Steve (the wrangler) set up thousands of fake accounts on Pinterest, had them work with each other to vote up pins with affiliate links in them and ended up earning $1000 a day when people clicked on the links.

Here's an easy guide to find out where you stand on this whole issue:

10: Steve is right (and smart). There's nothing wrong in what he did.
9: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using fake accounts is just wrong.
8: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using automation is just wrong.
7: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using low-cost MTurk web workers to pin your items is just wrong
6: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be just you and your team of Pinterest cross-promoters without any automation or fake accounts

5: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be just you (no automation)

4: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be products that you've actually used

3: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it's not going to be by you (Pinterest, bring back Skimlinks and monetize, you poor thing).

2: No affiliate links. It screws up the equation.

1: I hate affiliate links. If I see it, I'll go to Amazon without clicking on a link, buy something for a $1000 and then add a screenshot of the purchase as a comment.

Startup of Interest: GrabInbox

With Ping.fm transitioning to a paid version courtesy of Seesmic, I was on the lookout for another service providing functionality similar to it. Then, at some point, I signed up for Buffer (though I haven't used it too much yet) to schedule my social submissions. Looks like now I found an app that does both: GrabInbox.

It has the big guys set up to go (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). I'm just testing it out with Twitter for now.

 Based on my timezone (India), it figures out the best time to tweet. Why is it that websites and apps think GMT+5:30 is Kolkota? We *have* other cities.

Here's my Twitter account as seen in GrabInbox:

Other Goodies:

• Baked-in Analytics
• Bookmarkets & Chrome Plugin