Tynt Responds to SEO Community

Hi Everyone,

Last night there was quite a bit of chatter about Tynt’s new Beta release, particularly among the SEO and webmaster community who expressed legitimate concerns about how Tynt may impact their interests negatively.

I want to jump in and say that we take the concerns of all of our users (and future users) and the sites they frequent seriously and want to be good corporate citizens on the net. I am very pleased and grateful to Scott Polk (@scottpolk for Twitter users) who stepped forward to initiate a conversation with us directly. Scott has really helped Tynt understand the issues.

The purpose of our Beta release is to learn and discover whether Tynt works the way the community thinks it should. I want to assure all of you that we are taking both immediate and long term action to resolve the concerns you have raised. I will attempt to address those now.

First, we understand that Tynt has the potential to impact the major search engines in ways that were detrimental to the sites being Tynted. Our community recommended blocking spiders from crawling Tynts through the use of a Global Robots Exclusion file (robots.txt) as well as other techniques to minimize the problem. We have already implemented the ROBOTS.TXT file and are working on additional solutions.

Second, site owners have requested the ability to opt-out of having their sites publicly Tynted. We’ve given this a great deal of thought and agree that this is a necessary function of Tynt. In order to do this we need to think through the workflow of how this should function. My commitment to all of you in our community is that we will listen to your suggestions (feedback[at]tynt.com), learn what we need to do to implement them, and make changes as fast as possible and certainly before we come out of Beta.

The third concern was about handling of the misuse of Tynt by Tynters. It is our deep desire to create useful, in-context conversations, but we are not naive enough to think that we won’t have abuse of the tool as well. We are implementing abuse handling policies and definitely welcome feedback on the best way to manage this. We hope that with proper management Tynt can become an asset to the sites being Tynted. In one Tynt that was twittered yesterday, Tynt directly increased the traffic to the underlying site by 50%.

On one final note, we have been very publicly accused of being ‘content-thieves’ and scraping content from other sites, storing it in our own systems, and serving it up for our own benefit and revenue. When the Tynt plug-in is used, we only ever visit the original site and all Tynt content is simply layered on top of the existing site. In the case where the viewer is accessing a Tynt through our gateway (no plug-in installed in the browser) the gateway does not access a stored version of the underlying site, but rather loads the original site (including all images, media, advertising, and so on) and displays it to the user. The original site gets the ‘hit’, the ad view and so on. The reason for the gateway (and the different looking URL) is to allow us to insert the JavaScript which loads the Tynt engine for the in-context comments and conversations (and hey, if everyone installs the plug in, then there is no need for our gateway and we can save ourselves the bandwidth and effort there too!). We hope that Tynt can prove valuable to the underlying site by creating more page views and more ad views by encouraging people to share the sites that they feel a desire to comment on. We are very receptive to your feedback on how to make this experience good for the both the user and the site being Tynted, so if you have suggestions, please send them on!

The team here at Tynt, I am proud to say, are some of the best people I have ever been fortunate enough to work with. We all want to be proud of the work we do and make a positive impact in the world. We welcome your input and look forward to working with you as we develop Tynt.

Sincerely,

Derek Ball

CEO