

Vote: How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use - pchristensen
http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/

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jgrahamc
A very neat hack. Now it could be used for other purposes, for example, I
could ignore social sites and look at other major sites (e.g. I could see who
goes to CNN.com vs. FoxNews.com). Or a company could see which of its
competitors a visitor has visited.

Also, it would probably be possible to recurse on a site and figure out what
pages they are visiting. For example, suppose a top-level detect shows that I
visit reddit.com, the system could then load up a reddit specific page and
discover that I also visit reddit.com/r/funny. I would imagine that for some
sites that could be very revealing.

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smanek
wow, that's pretty clever. It uses CSS link-coloring to figure out if you've
visited various sites.

I didn't realize that works.

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josefresco
As a very active social bookmark user I don't need 'help' bookmarking your
site, I already have browser plugins, toolbar links and plenty if incentive to
bookmark if I find your article/site/page useful.

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jrockway
Most people are lazy though, and if you can get a few votes from the
lazy/indifferent, then you are more likely to end up on the front page (and
get all that ad revenue or whatever).

That said, I've gotten to the front page of delicious and reddit _without_
stupid tricks like this. I just wrote an article that people liked. (What a
concept.) I don't have ads either.

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Jasber
Very cool. I was thinking this would be some type of cookie hack. This is
pretty clever tho.

I'm not positive on the overhead for this. Loading a couple of links in an
iframe shouldn't be too expensive.

But if it were a problem you could easily create a solution to store these
settings in a cookie, so the iframe would only be loaded once.

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waldrews
It's a great find, but a huge security hole. The browsers have got to patch
it, even if it breaks some CSS functionality.

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dhotson
Very true. There is a a lot of potential for abuse of this kind of thing.

I heard about this technique a while back in a presentation about javascript
malware:
[http://www.spydynamics.com/spilabs/education/presentations/J...](http://www.spydynamics.com/spilabs/education/presentations/Javascript_malware.pdf)

.. there's a whole section on stealing browser history and how to figure out a
user's search history.

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swombat
That is pretty awesome. I was just about to write the social bookmarking code
for my new blog engine... this is excellent.

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caveman82
I was at a web 2.0 presentation couple weeks ago and there was a company
presenting their product, which turned out to be essentially a social-
bookmarking-aggregator. What's next? An aggregator for that as well?

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falsestprophet
Or: How to freak your visitors out

