That is, I will surely use it to spy on others. I will never use it on any of my own sites. No matter what amount of popularity it gains. No matter what they tell Guy Kawasaki. It’s worse than installing both Alexa toolbar (deemed spyware by any decent spyware detector, and pretty useless as of now) and Google toolbar (even the sound of using which makes me paranoid – and more so in the recent years) at the same time. It’s worse than hosting your spam generating scripts on some scammer’s server whose main goal is to steal your scripts and see what you’re doing. They act – or at least seem to act – like a true Big Brother, claiming to use “ISPs+ASPs+toolbars+opt-in panels” for collecting their data (since Overture/GoTo never got to be THE Big Brother of the Internet, Google style, doesn’t yet mean Bill Gross has no ambition to create something else that would). They are worse than Google Analytics even – because they make all that data public. Sure this could do a better job for evaluating what to charge for a link off a site using Compete than relying on oh-so-tweakable Alexa rank or oh-so-droppable Google pagerank… but I’m not selling links off any of my online properties for now, and to buy a link off elsewhere I have my own, erm, ways of evaluating their possible worth – so I’m not interested thank you.
Oh, and Compete can also make you look like a selfish moron too – just caught a glimpse of the top search keywords for Problogger.net:
1. problogger
2. about me
3. blogging
4. blogging tips
5. what is a blog
Hmm I wonder in what way can it help Darren Rowse “build search marketing campaigns that drive site traffic and increase sales”?
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