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Not Enough Ads? Install Adbar.
An anonymous reader writes "Jesse Ruderman brings the worst feature of Opera, Advertisements, to Firefox with his extension Adbar. According to the page, 'adbar displays Google ads related to pages you view. Because the ads are relevant, they are occasionally useful. When adbar isn't displaying ads from Google, it displays Firefox-related things such as silly Firefox slogans, ads for other Mozilla software, and requests for donations to the Mozilla Foundation.'"
but I've been using gmail for a number of months now, and I'm finding their targeted advertising more and more helpful.
I guess I've officially lost at the internet.
It's ads are actually GOOD - I've learned to pay attention to them when on Google. I might get this adbar...
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
Sorry, I prefer to keep my [very limited] desktop space.
Thanks anyway!
-Bullseye
To me, it seems like the same thing as buying a trade magazine (say, Micro Mart in the UK). You are specifically *asking* for adverts on what you're looking at; in effect advertising yourself as a potential and interested buyer.
All jocking aside, I beleive when grandparent says high moral road he's referring to is adware applications that don't hijack your computer, putting on excess bloat eventually rendering your computer useless on order to force their ads upon you.
Personally I've enjoyed using google's ads, as they offer me more or less the most relevant stuff I'm looking for during my surfing session. If this thing even gets popular, perhaps there will be less and less browser spamming, less pop-ups, less harassment over all. Ok I'll stop dreaming now.
In any case, I find google's ads very non-intrusive, and very relevant - those are the kind of ads I like to see.
Why was this modded as funny? He's right. It's a joke. Slashdot, you've been duped. He says that you can pay him, then uninstall the adbar to get rid of the ads.
That's what we humor conscious people call a joke. Just because it's not April 1st, doesn't mean that we can't bee fooled. And, just because the adbar works, doesn't mean it's not a joke.
Tisk, tisk, tisk.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
I always hate to see people actually go for something like this. Advertising is the one industry which provides nothing of value to society. The only ones who gain from advertising are medium to large businesses, as they are the only ones with the investment capital to saturate the market.
That said, if these people can get anyone to fall for this, more power to them. That's capitalism. At least they are up front about it, and not sneaky and underhanded like Gator & the like.
-Amalcon
From what I've seen on slashdot, you'll see more ads about how .NET is the best thing since...well...nothing. Ads run the internet. It's a plain and simple fact. There is no way most websites could afford to stay up if it wasn't for ad revenue. And the only way to maximize efficiency is to target the ads specifically to the people who are going to view them. That's why there are so many microsoft ads on this website. But what do I care, it's not going to sway the moderation system so it's not going to make slashdot into another C|NET.
Dealing with ads on the internet is like dealing with commercials on television. Accept them and move on.
Personally, I don't mind getting ads that are relevant and on my own terms. For some reason I quite enjoy looking at shopping catalogues and stuff even though 99% of the time I wouldn't buy anything from them. If there is something that I may be interested in then I don't mind being told about it.
For instance I've got my Amazon recommendations list as part of the Mozilla Browser home tab group. I don't always look at it but I do find something on it every now and then that I am interested in, and best of all it learns my preferences and offers more relevant results. Though it does tend do go off in unexpected directions and makes some less than relevant selected obviously based on keyword association.
Whats important for me is that the advertising is on my terms and not on the terms of someone else. I rarely watch any TV at the time is on and simply time shift it to where I can easily bypass the ads.
I've worked for a number of marketing departments now and every one of them has been focused on getting into the customers mindset anyway they can. None of them seemed concerned about annoying potential customers with advertising that they didn't want. They would run competitions so they could harvest contact details to advertise to consumers with and such and they got mightily offended when I compared their "directed marketing" to SPAM. Oh well...
All you are going to end up with is Adbar AND Gator on your computer. There is no reason to believe that Adbar would replace any other type of advertising. It would just amount to MORE advertising on the Internet. Ads in adbar as well as ads embedded in the site itself. See, the sites you visit want to make money too. It isn't like the money Google would get from this would somehow trickle down to other sites.
Voluntarily installing adbar is stupid. It would be like installing a device that sits on top of your TV and scrolls advertisements while you watch shows... that also have advertisment.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I'm sorry, but that has to be the most retarded method of "shopping" I have ever heard of. Advertisments are NOT there to inform you. They are there to mislead you into buying something you wouldn't otherwise buy. If you want to buy an appliance you should be searching the most unbiased consumer oriented sources you can find like Consumer Reports (although even those have been tainted by corporate influences). An informed, responsible consumer does not let advertisement directly influence their purchasing decisions. Advertisements are untrustworthy and insidious. We should be working as hard as possible to get them out of our lives... not invite them in. But I guess that is just me projecting my own opinions onto others. :-P
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You must not have tried Opera. If you pay for the license, you don't get the ads. If you don't want to pay, then you get the ads.
I like Opera enough that I did pay for the license. Actually, two licenses - one for Windows and one for Linux.
Personally, I have no problem with a software package having two modes - 1) free but you put up with advertizing and 2) pay with no advertizing.
If the ads are too annoying, I'll never put up with it long enough to decide whether or not I like it enough to pay for it so that there is no advertizing.
Same with almost all mass media. The big guys are big guys because they can subsidise the cost of unit production through selling advertising. Thus the massivly popular labour and union papers that used to be around were brought down explicitly because they didn't sell advertising space and thus couldn't compete on price. Unfortunatly, as soon as one person does it the rest are forced to follow. It's a shame really as I think it's destroyed the news media in the western world (I can't vouch for other parts of the world).
Does no-one in this thread think it's a joke? It appears to be functional, but it is clearly humourous, satirical, ironic - that kind of thing. Hats off to them.