For someone who is so smart, Mark Zuckerberg has no idea what he’s doing. He turned 28 on Monday and Facebook is having its’ IPO on Friday. The valuation will be somewhere close to $100 billion. Yes, he is getting out at the right time as there is no way Facebook is worth this much. I posted back on February 2nd, that Facebook peaked last year. It’s not just because I hardly ever use the site anymore. First the valuation is quite high. Facebook only made $1 billion last year. Apple makes more than $1 billion in less than a month. Oh, Facebook spent that billion on Instagram. Just like Research in Motion and Google, in trying to compete with Apple they will waste billions. While Mark Zuckerberg is smart in his timing, IMO he has no idea what to do with Facebook at this point. The recent redesign appears to be a failure. Are any Facebook users trying let alone using all the apps they promoted with the site redesign? The most humorous part of all this is Wall Street’s roadshow where Mark Zuckerberg has been saying mobile will be Facebook’s main focus in 2012. Recall Facebook took forever to release an iPad app because according to Mark Zuckerberg, “The iPad isn’t mobile.” Yes, investors should feel confident that Facebook knows where to go from here.

Skype is a huge company with a great reputation for cheap long distance and international calling. My uncle in Greece loves their service. I only started using the Skype app a month ago. See I make almost no long distance calls, but I joined an IM chat group that I wanted to follow closely. It’s running in the background and I noticed my iPhone is unusually hot at times. I’m not sure how often the Skype app is checking for new IM’s, but it must be constantly.

Further proof, not that I needed it, was provided by none other than @chronic (Chronic Dev team founder) who last week tweeted,
“I think Skype is strongly contributing to my battery drain, anyone know if it’s possible to fix? (without deleting, need the IM part of it)”

There is no doubt the IM part of the Skype app kills your iPhone battery. Thus, I’m bringing a charger with me to the office. Thanks Skype.

Oh, and the IM part of the app sucks too. It NEVER loads history beyond one screenful and doesn’t always receive messages. That is strange given the battery drain you would think it must be checking all the time. Sadly no. If I haven’t seen an new IM within an hour or two, I know I need to try and refresh. Once I missed over a screenful of something interesting. I had to login through my Mac to load the history to read the full conversation. Like I said, the app will not load history.

Yes, I’d say it’s the worst app on my iPhone by far. I wonder if it would still be this bad if Microsoft hadn’t bought them?

So setup 350 accounts. You can do this in the PinPal Bot software, but you need email accounts. There are many websites where you can purchase pre made Pinterest accounts. I bought 300 which cost just over $100 and setup 50 accounts manually. After that 5 accounts became my
“money” accounts that I would only do manually to make look real. I was going to use all the other accounts to re-pin and push traffic to the “money” accounts. Each day in April I’d run the same process. I would follow 200 other accounts as this would send them an email. A few would follow back. I would re-pin about 20 popular pins each day per account. Post a good pin of a cat and you’re sure to get some activity. My accounts were building. My fake Martha Stewart account had almost 500 Followers for all the Boards in just two weeks. I was ready to explore monetizing.

But then on April 13, Pinterest decided to address the spam issue. This made life more difficult. First, you could no longer just post affiliate links to Amazon. Second, they added a Report Pin for their users to flag the spam. I wasn’t too worried as there was one account I was following closely. Bob Jackson had 356 Boards with 76,810 Pins. That’s a lot of Pins. That’s over 200 Pins per day everyday for the past year. Given that most people never even heard of Pinterest a year ago, that amount of Pins should have put up a red flag. Yet a week after the blog post, when you clicked on any of Bob Jackson’s Pins it linked to a website called clickztrax.com. This was a landing page filled with ads. Get confused and click on something and the spammer gets paid. With literally hundreds of thousands of Pins and RePins for just one account the few early adopters were getting paid very well. All good things must end and about a week and a half ago, all 75,000 links on this one account died. No big deal, this is a cat and mouse game. This person used the link changer in the Bot and has all of them working again. Pushing to a landing page about free credit scores. Anyway that won’t last as it’s the lazy way to spam. The better way is to build your “money” accounts and link those to a blog. Post a few articles on this blog and it can start earning Adsense and Amazon revenue. Not a lot overnight, but these things build. If you are patient and stick with it you could build one to a dozen money making websites within a year. I’ve done it before.

So I kept spamming Pinterest with 200 Follows and about 20 repins per day while I built a quick blog. The night before I ran my first campaign to see how much traffic I could drive there Pinterest deactivated 250 of my 350 accounts. If you purchase PinPal Bot there is a Skype group for comparing notes. When I went in the room two other people said they had about a thousand accounts deactivated. I believe it was because they flagged any IP address that had multiple (say 10 or more) Pinterest user accounts created from that IP. I’m sure Pinterest deactivated a minimum of tens of thousands of accounts this past week.

Some of the more senior members of the Skype room claim few of their thousands of accounts got deactivated. Great for them. They knew to use proxies (fake IP addresses) when creating and using the accounts. One IP per account to be safest. Proxies cost about $0.70 each which isn’t chump change when you are running thousands of accounts.

Yes, it is getting harder to spam Pinterest. I decided to email Pinterest and see if they’d reactivate my “money” accounts. Strangely, they did for two out of four. They were all fake celebrities and while they allowed Martha Stewart to stay (they did ask me to change the name and photo) they got rid of Ellen Degeneres as “it looked like you were impersonating Ellen Degeneres.” You can read the full email Pinterest sent at the end of the article below the photos.

So have they gotten rid of the spam? Well, they’ve started, but trust me there are still over a million spam Pins being added to the website daily. Then again, maybe they’re smart not to care. Twitter was over-run with spam for awhile. I knew something was up when all these hot women started following me. This didn’t slow down Twitter at all and maybe that’s what Pinterest is going for? If you are interested in how the Pinterest Bot software works watch the video below.

142 of 144 accounts disabled for this file

Pinterest response of why account disabled

Pinterest response of why account disabled

Email for impersonation stated,
“Your account was disabled because it looked like you were impersonating Ellen Degeneres. You’re welcome to create a new account, but please note:
1. When you pin, other users see your display name and profile picture, not your username or about me, so even if you put a disclaimer in your bio section as you did on this profile, it can look as if you are impersonating another user.
2. We don’t yet have verified accounts like Twitter does. Right now, users can’t differentiate between an official celebrity account and a fan account.
You can learn more about our Acceptable User Policy here: http://pinterest.com/about/use/
Thanks for your understanding,”

Email for spam stated,
“Hi,

Your account has been deactivated because we’ve determined you were posting spammy content. We define spam as any unsolicited, unauthorized material that is promotional, commercial, fraudulent, false, deceptive, or misleading.

You are welcome to create a new account. Please note, we will take down accounts that are posting spam, violating other company’s trademarks, or engaging in unlawful activity on Pinterest.”

MegaUpload For Sale! Go here and you currently could win the domain name MegaUpload.net. The present bid is $7,100. That seems very low to me. Of course, MegaUpload.com is more valuable, but with it gone, this domain name would surely get tons of traffic. Of course you’d be crazy to do anything with copyright infringement with the FBI surely watching it. That said, would a site that just shows tutorials for how to get movies and TV shows from other sites be illegal? I don’t know but it would surely earn thousands of dollars in ad revenue per month if done right. Possibly a lot more.

Kim Dotcom Gets Over $700,000 Returned The New Zealand High Court ruled that Kim Dotcom be returned over $700,000 that were seized in the FBI raid. Items include his Mercedes-Benz with “Police” on its license worth $250,000 and a bank account containing $301,000. That should be able to pay his lawyers for a month?

Will Trial Ever Happen I still think it is doubtful Kim Dotcom will ever be extradited to the United States. The herring should happen this Fall. I read the judge informed the FBI that a trial may not happen as a you can not serve a foreign company with criminal charges. Are New Zealand politics getting involved? Kim Dotcom verified he wrote two $25,000 checks to Auckland mayor John Banks. Banks stupidly denied the comment and now is sticking by his story that he may have gotten the donation but was unaware. He also says he called Kim Dotcom to thank him for his $500,000 firework display donation to the city. Not for the $50,000 donation. I doubt it.

UK ISP’s Must Censor TPB News for those across the pond. The High Court ruled that UK ISPs including Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must censor The Pirate Bay website. Basically they will block it in a few weeks. I don’t know why so many people still use TPB when there are better torrent sites out there. With a quick Google search you can find a way around the block that isn’t too geeky.

I know things have been depressing ever since the USA shutdown MegaUpload. Well here is something I hope cheers you up. Open Safari on your iPhone, iPod or iPad and goto iOSLiveTV. There is no jailbreak required. The home screen gives you seven choices (United States, United Kingdom, Deutschland, France, Italia, PoccNR and XXX). The channel selection is massive. I haven’t looked through them all, but the United States includes (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Syfy, USA, A&E, Showtime, Cinemax, FX, ESPN, ESPN 2, Fox Soccer, TNT, History, MTV, Food Network, Discovery, CNN, Spike, truTV, Speed and more). The network stations include a East and West feed and there is even a channel guide showing what comes on next.
I’ve spent a few hours streaming over 3G and the quality is really great. There are a few adds, but nothing intrusive once you start streaming. The few times it stopped all I had to do was tap the play button again and it picked right back up. The stream is about 40 seconds behind the cable feed. Watching over 3G will eat through your data plan fast so you probably want to stick to wifi. Websites like this have popped up in the past, but they never last long. I’m sure you’ll be reading more about iOSLiveTV’s legal troubles soon.

Countries to Choose TV From

Channel Guide Showing What Comes on Next

Live Stream of ESPN

David Beckham at the beach with iPhone

Jessica Alba

Demi Moore

Lenny Kravitz using the coolest headphones I’ve seen on an iPhone!

Paris Hilton

Justin Bieber

Sandra Bullock

George Clooney

Sharon Stone

Miley Cyrus

JennyMccarthy

Megan Fox

Jennifer Aniston

A few numbers to explain my interest. Pinterest currently has about 1.5 million daily users. According to Mashable that makes Pinterest the third largest social network behind only Facebook and Twitter. It puts them ahead of LinkedIn and Google+. What’s more is they spend more time on the site (about 15 minutes per session on average) than on Facebook (12 minutes) or Twitter (3 minutes). Just under 70% of Pinterest users are female. This is obvious. If you’ve ever tapped the Popular tab on Pinterest you’re sure to see gorgeous photos of shirtless men, gardens and food. Weddings are another popular pin. What really blew my mind was the 25% of users have a household income of over $100,000. A huge 50% of users have children. I think a lot of Facebook soccer moms are starting to “cheat” with Pinterest.

I still don’t get it. I’ve spent hours on Pinterest the past week. I’ve seen some cool photos of places I’d like to travel to, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to find something specific. Pinterest is still too new. So it’s the wild west where you can still score usernames of famous people. The kicker is that Pinterest produces more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. Yes, retailers are loving the amount of customers they are getting through Pinterest. So are online magazines.

So while I’ll probably never get it, I’m sticking with Pinterest at least in the short term. Most people have still never heard of it and it’s good to be in on “social” networks before others.

If you’ve used Pinterest please tell me what you think. Or follow me here.