Ryan McFarland

One of the components of my weekly site statistic check was to use Social Meter.  They would ping a number of different sites and tally the links for a count of the site’s popularity.  As of today the site seems to just be a mirror for a site called Engrade.  A look at the domain gives some interesting information…

It has a Google page rank of 6.  It has an Alexa rank of 98,000 and almost 700 links according to Technorati.  Over 1,000 links from del.icio.us and over 16,000 links in Google’s system gives the site quite a bit of clout.

The registrar is Holt Labs at 101 Main Street San Diego, California 92101.  It was registered with GoDaddy on August 12th, 2006 and seems to expire August 12t, 2008.  So they must not have had their domain expire and had someone buy it up.  The Holt Labs website says they are “Incubating, developing, and managing the Internet’s leading innovative services.”  They list Social Meter and engrade as a few of their projects.  Engrade is a service for teachers parents and students that allows for instant sharing of grades.  It makes money from ads.  Their site says Social Meter was sold to Adaptive Blue in 2006.  Adaptive Blue makes a plugin for Firefox that conveniently adds a link to Amazon products on any website matching any product’s name (undoubtedly giving Adaptive Blue a cut of the sale).  It seems that if Adaptive Blue bought Social Meter then the site would mirror their money making site instead of Holt’s ad supported site.

Whatever is going on, i’m going to go through my old posts and remove the links to Social Meter.