OK – I am peeved; the Daily Mail has it, the NY Daily News has it, and several blogs have it. Adriana found it yesterday, pointed me at it, and I was horrified when I worked it out.
“It” is Tynt Tracer, and it’s the biggest piece of evil to infest blogs since Snap.COM.
The way it presents to the user is very simple:
- Go to a page, eg: the NY Daily News article.
- Highlight a paragraph
- Copy the Paragraph
- Paste the paragraph into something else, eg: a Text Editor or blogpost creation window.
You will see something like this:
A shotgun-wielding owner of a Harlem restaurant-supply company blasted two robbers to death and wounded two others on Thursday when he caught them pistol-whipping his employee, police said.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/08/13/2009-08-13_harlem_biz_owner.html#ixzz0OEsFnn4x
See that “read more” bit? You didn’t copy that. It wasn’t on the page you copied. It was inserted into your cut-buffer by Tynt Tracer, a bit of javascript which logs what you are copying at a central site and then inserts a URL into your cut buffer, for convenience tagged with a token that (approximately) highlights the section in the original page when someone else clicks the link.
Also: what you copy gets put on the Tynt home page as an advert / for hype purposes.
I am not a great JS guru, but a quick scan of the source code (http://tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/Tracer.js) shows some interesting snippets:
TraceServer.WRITE_URL="http://w1.tcr1.tynt.com";
TraceServer.READ_URL="http://r1.tcr1.tynt.com";
TraceServer.PAGE_TRACKER_URL="http://p1.tcr1.tynt.com";
var COPY_WITH_ATTRIBUTION=0,COPY_WITH_NO_ATTRIBUTION=1,SELECTION=2,IMAGE=3;
var MINIMUM_WORDS_FOR_COPY_WITH_ATTRIBUTION=7;
var MINIMUM_CHARACTERS_FOR_COPY_WITH_ATTRIBUTION=14;
var GENERATED_FROM_TRACE=1,GENERATED_FROM_ADDRESS_BAR=2,GENERATED_FROM_TYNT_COM=3;
var firstAction=1;
var firstCopy=2;
…
var sponsorText="Sponsored by: ";
var attribution2StaticText="Under Creative Commons License: ";
var attribution2Types=["","Attribution","Attribution Share Alike","Attribution No Derivatives","Attribution Non-Commercial","Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike","Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives"];
var licenseUrl=["","http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0","http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0","http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0","http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0"];
…
if(sponsor!=0){
W=W+"\n<br>"+sponsorText+' <a href="http://tcr'+sValue+".tynt.com/ads/"+encodeURIComponent(sponsor)+"/"+userId+"/"+guid+'">'+decodeURIComponent(sponsor)+"</a>";
}
…
var tracerBlocked=function(){
if(/disableTracer=/.test(window.location.href)){
var B=window.location.href.match(/disableTracer=([^?$]*)/)[1];
var A=new Date();
A.setDate((B&&B=="on")?(A.getDate()+365):(A.getDate()-2));
writeTopLevelCookie("disableTracer="+userId+";
expires="+A.toUTCString());
document.body.innerHTML='<br><br><br><span style="font-size: 32px;">Tracer has been turned '+((B&&B=="on")?"off":"on")+" in this browser.<br>You may close this window.</span>";
return true;
}
It seems everything goes through central servers at Tynt.com; there is (sigh) apparently some way of electively turning it off, and there seems to be some notion of putting sponsorship information into the text at later date. I am guessing that the cc-license stuff is to do with marking copied text as licensed in some way?
There’s not much critical discussion out there at the moment http://www.ericlander.com/324.html seems to be “it”; Eric’s posting is from September last year, so I am wondering why it’s taken so long to go mainstream? That said, discussion from last year seems to have a different bent, which may help explain the delay:
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/ready-set.-tynt
[…] In essence, Tynt allows you to share your thoughts/perceptions/highlights with your closest friends.
And, in that thought, lies the power of Tynt. In this wired world of expanding and limitless information, we rely more and more on people we know and trust to give us the straight dope. We pay attention to recommendations and thoughts from our friends. For those that have read “The Tipping Point,” Tynt is evangelism on steroids.
For example, Guy Kawasaki, noted technology evangelist, Twitters to 18,000 followers. Guy is going to start using Tynt to put some thoughts on a web page and then send out a tweet with a link to his Tynt. That’s part of Tynt’s release yesterday; Tynt for Twitter … Tynt gives Twitter context. Another big name that’s going to start using Tynt for Twitter is Mark Silva from Realbranding.com.
Think of the power of Tynt for social networks, where you already connect with many of your friends … being able to give each other context with your surfing would be, like, way awesome (Or, maybe you just want to put funny glasses and a bowtie on your buddy’s Facebook page picture for giggles). Tynt for bloggers (yes, you’ll see Tynt’s in my future blogs). For people doing market and industry research. Digg users could really use Tynt. Google’s new Chrome browser’s weak bookmarking could adopt Tynt for contextual bookmarks.
Communication from a corporate website to a surfer is usually controlled and one-way. You read the words that the marketer or the public relations person want you to read. Now all that stuff you find in blogs, forums and communities about a company can be read directly on the website, in the context it’s meant to be in. Click here to see what I think of the Canon FS 100 Camcorder:
http://www.usa.canon.com.tynted.net/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=2544&modelid=16185
(if that doesn’t make CMO’s shake in their boots, I don’t know what will!)
Tynt is officially in public Beta as Derek and his team continue to press forward on this ground breaking technology. There’s still some glitches, for sure (especially on my Mac Firefox browser), and I can imagine they’re going to have some scaling issues as they become more popular, but it’s already a great “Wow” experience. Tynt comes as a browser plug-in, or as a web browser app … to find out more, check out their blog: http://tynt.wordpress.com/.
…which makes it sound like a technology in search of a problem to solve: in a year it has gone from “letting users mark up pages”, to “what’s being copied from your site?”
Plus “Tynt gives Twitter, context!” – who would have thought it needed “context” to be successful?
In any case – I leave this open for your comments, analyses and discussion; I for one do not like the “Read more:…” markup, I don’t like waiting for Tynt to book-in my copy actions, I don’t like them, measuring how many people click on links that I tweet and mail (“influence marketing”, anyone?) and I don’t like the intrusion.
As soon as I can, I am blocking them.
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