fox@fury
Qwer.org Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed.
Friday, Feb 26, 2010
Yesterday I shut down the 9 year old url shortening service qwer.org. I pointed all traffic from qwer.org to a penguin flash game with a banner ad at the bottom. Scandal! Uproar! Mea Culpa! The kind of scandal that lead a social media pundit to email me this morning asking me to explain the series of events that led me to turn a link shortening service into a profit vehicle. The kind of uproar that causes a person to make an anonymous Twitter account for the sole purpose of asking me to explain my path to the dark side. It all sounds pretty nefarious and nasty until you discover that the site was shut down because it had only two users: one a black-hat SEO driving traffic and pagerank to illegal pharma sites and a person who used the content-hosting features of Qwer to host Second Life patterns in a way that could be accessed in-game, and that his pages have been whitelisted for 4 weeks until I shut down stuff completely. Average number of daily visitors to qwer.org? 11. Average number coming from somewhere other than Second Life? 3. I hate being such a boring scandal.
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aboutme

Hi, I'm Kevin Fox.
I've been blogging at Fury.com since 1998.
I can be reached at .

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I post most frequently on Twitter as @kfury and on Google Plus.

pastwork

I've led design at Mozilla Labs, designed Gmail 1.0, Google Reader 2.0, FriendFeed, and a few special projects at Facebook.

©2012 Kevin Fox