Alpha Inventions

January 5, 2009 6:52 PM

Alpha Inventions may be familiar to anyone who blogs and has seen a traffic uptick with this mysterious web site as a referrer. The concept is simple -- type in your web address and Alpha Inventions is supposed to take care of the rest -- for a few seconds at least.
posted by Alexandra Kitty (13 comments total)

"I'm a friggin genius!" quotient a little too high for my tastes.

"People's instant reactions are gonna be great" quotient—way too high for my tastes. The Net's got enough "ur a looser" and "FRIST PSOT" as it is.

On preview, FRIST PSOT!
posted by eritain at 7:11 PM on January 5

I can't even tell what it does. What does it do?
posted by mosessis at 7:17 PM on January 5

It's like the internet is surfing you!
posted by cjorgensen at 7:18 PM on January 5

It's like a huge, broken brain of text. I can't read it any more.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:20 PM on January 5

Man, that guy's fantastic. Just ask him.
posted by pompomtom at 7:31 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

> I can't even tell what it does. What does it do?

Hit the 'Alpha Inventions may be familiar' link and you load a page which runs a script. The scriptloads an arbitrary blog in a frame. After a couple seconds, it loads another blog. As far as you, the viewer, are concerned, it's random. And it's as useful as any other kind of random information, which is to say, not very.

Owners of those blogs see upticks in their traffic. But the traffic serves no purpose; nobody's going to read your blog because it appeared in the Alpha Inventions site, because they can't even see your blog for long enough to know if it's worth reading. Then again, if you're running a spammy blog full of random gibberish just for the adwords value, you probably don't care or even know why you should.

Posting this on mefi is driving traffic to crap. Flagged.
posted by ardgedee at 7:37 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

I thought some of the sites that loaded looked cool, but I think it only works with blogger, wordpress, etc. Roll your own and you're out.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:56 PM on January 5

So the idea is that you put in your blog's URL, and by doing so, it gets included in a list that users of the site may get randomly sent to, for a few seconds, sort of like they're "channel surfing" the internet?

I guess I'm not offended by it, but I really don't see the point. The key advantage of the WWW, versus (say) watching TV, is the ability to follow links and chase a semantically-related thread from one page to the next. "Flipping through" web pages at random, hoping you'll stumble across something you like, seems like a ridiculously poor use of the medium. Particularly when there are tons of aggregator and link-blog services (like MeFi) that provide "random" (to you) content selected non-randomly, because it's actually thought to be interesting by someone else.

Doesn't have any appeal to me. But then again, I hate channel-surfing too, so maybe I'm just not the intended audience.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:01 PM on January 5

Just what the world needs -- a less-well-thought-out (and really ugly) Stumbleupon! Aces!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:09 PM on January 5

I was directed to a Hotmail inbox.
posted by rageagainsttherobots at 8:43 PM on January 5

> I hate channel-surfing too, so maybe I'm just not the intended audience.

This is a putative service for blog owners. Alpha Inventions increases your website's traffic by making it part of the endless stream of pages pumped into the browser of anybody stupid enough to keep AI's page open for long. Blog owners can then brag about increased site traffic, whether for bragging rights or to weasel out more ad revenue.

But if you set up your blog to communicate with people, this is crap. Your site gets more page loads, but nobody's reading it; you've consigned it to background noise. Promote yourself in some way that reaches your intended audience, not backgrounded browser windows.

I can't call Alpha Inventions spam, but it's in the same part of the ethical spectrum. I'd flag this post twice if I could.
posted by ardgedee at 8:47 PM on January 5

From his description, it looks like people are missing one aspect of this: it doesn't just grab random blogs and post them, it only grabs blogs that have just been updated and posts them.

So if you watch their site you are seeing blogs as they are being created.

I'm not sure if this is any more useful than just showing random blogs.
posted by eye of newt at 9:01 PM on January 5

I am. It's not.
posted by Flunkie at 9:09 PM on January 5