Dear HootSuite,

Seriously, knock off the linkjacking. It’s not cool.

I’ve been getting irritateder and obnoxiated every time I inadvertently get sent to an ow.ly shortened url only to find it’s been link-jacked. So I just did some ‘research’ and discovered that NOBODY USES OW.LY except your popular range of Twitter clients. People love your client, and they love sharing links. This results in them sharing links WITH YOUR CLIENT. Which results in me swearing and owls being threatened.

This means you are squarely to blame for this annoyance that I face on a daily basis. So knock it the crap off.

In my frequent rantings about this on Twitter and Buzz, people always say “Oh yeah! I HATE that!,” so I know I’m not alone. I’m just one of the few bothered to say anything about it. Here are a few that I ran across today:

@ahockley – I consider the use of ow.ly as an indicator of someone I probably should ignore

Linda Lawrey – Oh.. Now I know.. I don’t like those links for that exact reason!

Duncan Rawlinson – You’re right. I forgot how annoying that thing is! I turned it off although it really shouldn’t exist at all…

Woodsy the Owl – Give a ‘hoot’ don’t pollute… the Internet with your shitty linkjacking.

Seriously. I’m beginning to hate owls now. And it’s your fault.

UPDATE: Someone from HootSuite contacted me and clarified a few things. First off, they say ow.ly shortening is “opt-in,” that users have to go out of their way to get HootSuite to shorten the url via ow.ly, that they are free to use whatever external shortener they want. It’s just that prominent ‘Shrink It’ button that uses ow.ly.

Secondly, they point out that one can just click the X in their linkjack bar to turn it off “permanently.” I’ve clicked that X a number of times, yet keep seeing it.

Thirdly, they advised that I install browser hacks to circumvent their doucheyness on a more permanent basis:

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg BTW, if you want to disable the ow.ly bar another way, try this: http://toys.funcy.co.uk/userscripts/hootFix.user.js

and that if I want to keep my content from being linkjacked, that I should just install ‘framebusting’ code which has been used for years. Great, so I need to take action to prevent not only myself from being affected, but also my content. Douchey.

And finally, they have this to say:

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg Sure, but ow.ly is free. We make no money off it. If people use our service, we’ll frame it. Otherwise, use something else.

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg You can always choose not to click an ow.ly link. ^CT

There you have it, straight from the owl’s beak. They know what they’re doing is douchey, but don’t give a hoot. The solution offered is a really simple one, though: “Don’t click on the links your friends send you.”

And that’s the plan. I hope you’ll keep this in mind when you decide how you want to share links.

UPDATE UPDATE: I asked why they jack links if the service doesn’t make them any money. This was the reply:

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg Ow.ly integrates with our stats, and allows us to offer an all-in-one solution for customers. We do customer support for it.

There you have it. HootSuite acts like a douche to the entire Internet to make it easier to charge their customers for things. Nice.

Dear Amazon,

The Kindle is nice and all, but it’s a lot of money for a dedicated device for reading books when I already have tons of devices capable of reading books. A screen, a wireless connection and a keyboard. That describes a Kindle. That also describes laptops, cellphones, iPhones, PDAs, etc.

If you want to sell lots more ebooks, I suggest you release Kindle software for some or all of those devices. Specifically I would suggest laptops and iPhones. The iPhone is my preferred way to read Kindle books (it is way smaller and lighter than Kindle, and I already have it with me all the time), but it’d be really swell if I could wirelessly purchase the books from you and not have to break the law in order to read them.

Now that Apple has 3rd-party apps for iPhone/iPod Touch, I HIGHLY recommend that you make a Kindle app for them. You’ll sell bajillions more books than you already do. BAJILLIONS.

Hey Google,

It’s me again.  Since our last conversation, I’ve realized something else you could do to make our time together in Reader more productive and less angrifying.  Know how I share lots of stuff in my “Shared Items,” despite only like 4 people seeing them?  Well, it’d be really helpful if I didn’t have to be subscribed to my own Shared Items.  I mean, I shared them.  I don’t need you showing them to me again. (Despite that one time that I accidentally saw something cool in there that I forgot had gotten there because of me, and went ahead and shared it again.  Sharing an item from my shared items… that’s classy.)  At the very least, could you make sure they actually get marked as read after I read them?  I perpetually have 11-or-so “new” items in there that I’ve seen a hundred times.

Seriously, Google.  I’m beginning to think this conversation is one-sided.  Don’t make me start writing to SkyNet instead.

Hey, <a href=“http://google.com”>Google</a>? 

I know we’re not the bestest of friends, but you may have noticed that we spend a rather large amount of time together.  I’ve been thinking: I’d like for you to do something for me to make that time just a little bit more pleasant.

You know how I use <a href=“http://reader.google.com”>your Reader</a> to read all the blogs and stuff to which I subscribe?  (Of course you do.  You know EVERYTHING about me.)  Anyway, I frequently find that, after reading an article in TOP of the post — which is the only place you include a link to the originating item’s URL.  Could you go ahead and add a link at the bottom of each entry as well, so I don’t have to keep scrolling back up, oftimes quite a distance?

You may have noticed that your FeedBurner service frequently includes “comment” links in the bottoms of people’s posts, and that most feeds include “comment-url” fields that you could use to generate “comment on this” links rather easily.  It would be even more spectacular if, when you have such data, you could go ahead and generate such a link for me and put it in the footer of each item.  In the absence of this data, a simple link to the originating URL would suffice nicely. Either way, a link at the bottom of the post would be at least as — if not more — valuable as the one at the top.

Aside from making me happier, this could also help provide you with another metric of usage by your users.  You’ll know which posts they commented on, and can provide them a list so they can check up on them later.  It seems to me that knowing the level of interactivity users have with specific sites would be a rather valuable addition to the amount of data you amass on each of your users, allowing you to target advertisements just that much more accurately.

This simple addition could go a long ways towards making my — and undoubtedly countless others’s‘s — time with you just that much more pleasant.  Not to mention that it would make each and every one of us just that much more valuable to you as a statistic.

Hopefully yours,
Oh heck — like you don’t already know who I am.

Dear GIMP developers,

It is hard enough for me to convince people that GIMP is quite capable of doing pretty much everything the average user of Photoshop would require from it without you guys up and moving shit around all the time, and/or releasing “stable” versions that don’t function properly.  Had I not had 10 years of wonderful experience working with GIMP before running the version that Ubuntu installed for me, I would have not only been pulling my hair out, but I’d be advocating that no one ever waste their time with it in the first place as well.  Stuff just doesn’t work.  Weirdnesses to which I had finally adjusted are now either gone or weirder.  My active layer keeps getting into a state where neither I nor plugins can change it.  Selections are behaving strangely.  I’d hate to have my income be dependent upon using GIMP, because I’m having serious troubles getting anything done with it right now.

Granted, Ubuntu is giving me a somewhat outdated version, but I would think that however old the version is, coming from the “stable” tree would ensure that it, you know, would WORK properly?  I suppose it’s possible that the Ubuntu folk may have broken something after you were through with it, but I can’t help but wonder whether most of the Internet ravings from Photoshop users about how GIMP is worse than MS Paint might be as a result of crap like I’m running across now.  I know that GIMP is a top-notch application that, aside from some annoying quirks from time to time, is perfectly capable of replacing what 95% of Photoshop users use it for (despite that not being the intent of GIMP in the first place), but trying to get anything done with this release (2.4.2) is proving impossible for this 10-year veteran self-proclaimed GIMP ‘expert.’   I’m pulling my hair out trying to get anything done; I’d suspect new users, however, would just tell their friends how much it sucks and be done with it.

In the decade or so that I’ve been using GIMP I’ve gone from the bleeding-edge compile-it-myself-the-minute-it’s-released type of user to kind that just uses whichever release his package manager presents him with; I’m pretty sure the latter is the group that most of your user-base falls into.  You need to make sure that those people don’t come across crap like this, because they’re the ones who aren’t going to put up with it and end up saying bad things about you.  Isn’t that why you have the unstable tree in the first place?