The Recursive ISV

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To open this post, a quick update on MixAction, but the rest of this article will be focused on a subject a little more distasteful.

I’ve blogged here before about MultMediaSoft and their stunning developer tools.  MixAction uses them and because I’ve been so delighted I purchased the entire Audio suite, the whole shebang and not just part as I had previously.  An absolute bargain.  It’s a pleasure working with Severino with support issues, instant response and almost (within one hour) instant solutions.  The Audio library is an absolute joy to work work with and it allows me to expand for the future into areas more quickly and easily with MixAction and associated products than I’d originally envisaged.  I mention this as an indication that MixAction is still being heavily re-developed, in spite of some hiccups this week with bad power supply (ongoing brown outs at my wife’s place destroying three computers this year there, even with a filter) and an adventure here with a very dead, 6 month old Microsoft mouse that I had to replace as my other mice are cable mice and the darn cables don’t reach on the development machine to my desk.  So another $100 + on a new Microsoft keyboard/mouse combo which is - er  - “comfortable” I guess even if the pricing is ludicrous.

OK.  Today I thought I’d do a quick piece on an issue I’ve spoken to a few people on, that I feel is significant to mISV’s.  Namely those archaic, pre-dot com bust relics of the bulletin board era, that I now firmly believe to be deleterious to an mISV’s business.

These website’s, that swallow voluminous quantities of PAD files daily expelling them onto pages like some kind of digital dysentery, surrounded by pustules of Google  Adsense, have become so common it would be fair to label them a web-pandemic.

In order to get a handle on these blights, that pockmark the search engine landscape like serial acne, one has to consider a little bit of history of where they came from.  How they began, as is so often the case, as a good thing and then devolved into a malicious out of control monster.

So let’s dig a little for a moment, into the strata of software downloads history.

When I began in this industry, or at least, first started participating in it, there weren’t any download sites, no publicly available “Internet”  and, scary as it may seem, no Bulletin Boards - at least in this country - that one could log onto and get the latest and greatest.  You exchanged floppy disks.  Actually, that’s not true.  You exchanged cassette tapes because my (and everybody I knew who had one) “home” computer accepted that as a storage medium. 

Things changed and in the early to mid eighties,  while I typed in decimal into a terminal and got hex out the other end on tape (unless I was forced to work on software for an even older machine that spat out oct) by day I could go home and dial in on a modem and save all kinds of goodies to my - er - floppy disks.

The era of the bulletin board had come to Oz.  Later came the “shareware” revolution that brought such cool things as PKZip (Yay!!  We could finally get rid of Arc and LHA and AlHarc and all the others).  This was the only method a software developer could distribute software if you couldn’t finance retail distribution (which meant most of us).  You basically uploaded your latest and greatest software to your local friendly BBS and through a network of services like Fido and others your release actually could go world wide.  One of my favorites was Algorithms Anonymous run by my good friend Glenn Crouch in Kalgoorlie Australia.

In the early to mid-nineties the Internet era dawned and the humble BBS began to decline (in some ways I still miss them, they tended to attract folks who were a little friendlier than the Internet is today). 

With the development of the “Web” (and if you’re reading this and thinking Web = Internet please do some research) the download sites appeared.  Download.com, Winsite, Tucows, even the renegade NoNags (a rather two faced download site that prohibits software asking for payment (nags) but who has no problem asking the visitor continuously to “register” for unfettered access), to name a few.

There were of course a lot of smaller sites who were run by enthusiasts who gave a damn about software (often programmers themselves)  and who offered value to the web surfers experience on the net and greatly aided us all in the distribution of our software to the public (a more technical and specialized public than the general public who now also access the Internet (and to whom most malware is squarely aimed).

Many of these sites, big and small, used banner adds to defray the costs of running the site, and hopefully a bit on top as profit.  Remember this was pre-dot com bust.  Google’s founders hadn’t begun Google yet, the search engine landscape being dominated by players that many folks haven’t heard of , but were big in their time. 

The only real survivor of this era search engine wise now is Yahoo.  Since we’re using paleontology as a metaphor in this article, if download sites are Jurassic then the likes of Yahoo could be classified as being relics from the Pleistocene of the digital era.  Any similarity to Yahoo and a Neandertal are purely coincidental.

Anyway, these download sites served a valuable function to both the developer (distribution) and the consumer (access).

To facilitate the process a file was distributed with every download of a program (almost) called FileID.diz.  This was a descriptive file that the download site could use for information about the software product and to a lesser extent the consumer could get a summary after downloading (most downloads were still in archives, such a zip files,  installers and especially exe installers were as rare as chicken teeth).

Towards the end of the nineties a developer friend of mine, Harold Holmes, along with several other folks in the ASP discussed and then Harold created the PAD file (Portable Application Description), an XML file that could be parsed by a download site to provide a full description of the product, with a choice of parameters almost automagically. 

I still have the official mouse mat that went with the release. 

A great idea.  A truly great innovation.  An elegant solution to a problem and worthy of great respect.

That’s when PADKIT was born.  This monster was inadvertently spewed from the ASP as a tool to assist in the automation of PAD file incorporation by download sites.  The idea was a good one, but little did they know (or could know) that it would end up being used for the purposes of SEO spamming.

Once Google had become a predominant force in the SEO wars after the dot com bust the door was open.  Previously to get folks to advertise on your website you had to get results.  To get results you needed a reputation.  A bit of a chicken and egg problem.  Google removed this with one fowl (misspelling intentional) swoop. 

Adsense.

It’s not that Adsense in itself was evil, or that Google was evil, or is, but rather that the world is composed of some folks who are intrinsically and pathologically evil and Adsense + PADKIT + PAD meant “BHHHhhhhahhahahhahaa!” in voices that make the witches from Macbeth sound like ladies you’d invite home to meet mother.

It’s bad enough most of these cruddy sites surround a listing with Adsense adds that all to frequently advertise your competitor or a link to some pimply faced Jolly Roger’s site advertising a crack or keygen, but they then started burying the download link in tiny text literally compelling the visitor to click an add.

The next phase was to require you to click the download link and be taken to another page full of more Adsense and another download link in type size that would make a great home for an amoeba, but wouldn’t fit much else.

That the likes of Softpedia, the ultimate spinners of bovine excrement in relation to scanning for spyware, who founded themselves on PAD files would then move to ripping content not from the PAD file but directly from the software developers website was the first indication I saw of where things had arrived.

OK.  We did have (and have) the cases of PAD spoofing.  Basically the process of some crook posting a PAD file purporting to be from a real software developer with real products (in other words replacing legitimate entries on a download site with a link to a malware payload) which led to the ASP pursuing digital signing of PAD files.  A concept that is a great idea, but not overtly successful at this point, nor to I expect it to become so.

Andy Bryce did some great work exposing and defining the nature of these download sites with his Software Award Scam.  Click the link to Andy’s site if you’ve not read it, then drop back here.

Right.  Read it?  Got it?  Scam.  Worth less than the electrons used to generate the “awards”.  If you’re displaying this garbage on your website then GET RID OF THEM!  Don’t participate in this fraud, it just encourages these sites and for some folks lends them credibility.

Alright.  Given the last four paragraphs above.  These sites, Softpedia (who remember had no problems stealing content to do so) and others fill pages 1 to 50 (and beyond) of Google for just about any downloadable software product available on the net today.  For a canny software developer this isn’t a big problem.  Getting to the top is possible.  For newcomers it’s almost futile.  It’s not a level playing field.  Stealing content, being good Google customers (lots of Adsense remember?) and sheer numbers of the darn things means they frequently outrank the actual software developer and genuine reviews of software by journalists and consumers.

Remember, if they rip your content from your website or steal your search terms and other tricks Google is likely to punish you, especially if you’re new, for duplicating content.  These download sites become “authorative”.  You are assumed to be SPAM.

Hardly good SEO sense for the software developer, is it?

I blogged here some time back about downloading early this year bucket loads of files from download sites, many well known ones and some mentioned above.  Download.com, Tucows and their likes were as clean as a whistle.

But most of the others had malware.  Not every download, not even most downloads, but some downloads.  Belying their banners proclaiming scanned and “spyware” or “malware” free.

Why do they do it?  I don’t think they place the nefarious files there themselves.  That’s the work of others, unconnected.  In some cases it’s PAD file hijacking.  BUT - these download sites simply don’t care.  They don’t even remove the offending links.

Apart from the Adsense income to boost the ranking of other sites it’s about “Blackhat SEO”.  The process of creating a website specifically to benefit another site.  In fact they BRAG about doing it.  They have no interest in the software, the developer or the consumer.  Indeed all indications are that all they have is utter contempt.

In conclusion, for now at least, I for my part will have nothing to do with the download sites with the exception of download.com, Tucows a few others carefully picked by me. 

Google will wake up to them.  But it will take time.  Probably within the next twelve months to three years IMHO.  At that point they’ll be dropped from the engine.  Many of them are going to be labeled for containing malware.  Google has begun doing this, Yahoo has joined up with Useless Incorporated (otherwise known as McAfee SiteAdvisor) - see my post here on this - and I certainly don’t want to be caught in the fallout, which I believe must occur, when they do.  Do you?

MixAction will be released with a license prohibiting download sites carrying it with implicit written instructions for those sites that may do so.  For sites in the Western world I intend to enforce that license.  For those elsewhere who can cringe from such things impervious (for now) to Berne and other restrictions, I’m working on something a little different.

Conclusion?  Download sites = Extinction Event.  A Google driven comet impact coming their way.

It’s way past my bedtime, I’ve written enough for this article.  I’ll look at following it up in the future if folks are interested.

I know a lot of folks are not going to agree with me here.  I guess it’s one of those inconveniant posts one would prefer not to read.  All I ask is that you consider it.  Think about it.  Do some snooping of your own.  It’s not hard.  Then come to your own conclusions.

For those who think the SEO advantages outweigh the disadvantages I’ve talked about, consider that the software industry is the only industry that has these kind of leeches hanging of it on the web.  Nothing comes close nor has the same impact.  Even the music download industry has to fight it’s way to the top of the listings unaided - and they manage to do it…

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The squeaking wheel doesn’t always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced. - Vic Gold

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