Comments on: Mashable Playing it Dirty with Google Buzz Count

By: Estonish

Estonish — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:45:44 +0000

Balkhi, thanks for pointing out this flaw. I was unaware that anyone could manipulate the numbers like this. It make me suspect of many sites with high sharing numbers.

By: Loveish

Loveish — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:52:36 +0000

I never thought that Mashable can play a dirty game like this. There are lots of bloggers who follow Mashable, So they should not set an example like this for others.

By: Steven Vance

Steven Vance — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:26:41 +0000

It’s great you have clients who trust you!

By: Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:25:02 +0000

Hehe, yeah Harsh. I started developing this for clients because they really really wanted it. It was not very hard to do, but at the end I did convince them to not go this route and wait till the actual API comes out.

By: Harsh Agrawal

Harsh Agrawal — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:17:08 +0000

Nice Find Balkhi.. I have been searching for the code to make the share count wordpress plugin for buzz, but realize we need to wait for official API, else the plugin wont be feasible for mass use..

By: Chris Peterson

Chris Peterson — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:01:11 +0000

Thanks for sharing your information. But I didn’t find any advance from Google Buzz

By: Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:05:08 +0000

Hey Steven,

Yes I mean exactly that. I clicked on the link and did not share the story. I am not annoyed because they are sharing all about Buzz because that is what a social media magazine suppose to do. Talk about what is new in social media. My issue was with the count and that it is wrong to do it this way.

I have taken numerous psychology classes and a lot of studies have shown when people see a large group of users doing something, they will follow it. So when you show a user false count (whether it is manipulated or not), you are misguiding users into clicking and Buzzing the story.

That is what I found to be the dirty trick <<

By: Amit

Amit — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:11:29 +0000

thanx for the info

By: Steven Vance

Steven Vance — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:13:44 +0000

I’m guessing that when you said, “I took 30 seconds and manipulated the count,” that means you just clicked on the link 16 times.

Interesting trick there, Mashable. A lot of people are being annoying right now and saying Mashable is now some shill for Google. Nope, they’re just doing what a lot blogs/news sites do: write about current topics (quickly and often) and gather as many page views as possible.

By: Honey Singh

Honey Singh — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:14:28 +0000

I noticed this 3 days back while building the chrome extensions for buzz. When i figured that buzzed number’s are gathered from bit.ly api then i feel doubt about the uniqueness. Right now google buzz api didn’t offer any post method (it only have get updates api).
Hope this will be resolved as soon as we have post api of the buzz.