Mahalo's "Facebook Login" page | Hacker News Reader

Mahalo's "Facebook Login" page

mahalo.com

13 pointsunderover11 comments

Sometimes I have an opinion that something is not HN but I ask "Why is this HN?" just in case there is an unexpected and interesting angle I haven't seen. Even then, I usually have an idea why something was posted, I get the gist of why it is interesting to HN readers even if I haven't grasped why it should "Gratify my intellectual curiosity."

In this case, I have absolutely no idea why this is interesting, which suggests to me that I am missing something that is right under my nose. What am I looking at here?

After the readwriteweb.com "Facebook Login" debacle, this page looks extremely optimized to position itself the same way.

This is just my interpretation.

Especially the section: "Common Misspellings of Facebook" which is clearly to grab searches that contain typos.

People like posting examples of garbage on Mahalo because the community generally seems to think they are a scummy company.

It's pretty much the intellectual equivalent of Fox News appearing on the Reddit frontpage. You know why they're there, you know what's going to happen, it's not worth looking at.

you're looking at an attempt to profit from the stupidity of the masses.

1) I want to login to facebook

2) google search for "facebook login"

3) profit (for mahalo)

HN has always had a fair share of post exposing bad/stupid things done by online companies (remember the stories about Google Buzz & privacy problems?), and I think that since Calacanis is from the startup scene, this makes him doubly relevant here.

And there's no doubt that trying to get people to click on Adsense ads while mistakenly thinking that they're going to log into their Facebook page is slimy and worth exposing.

I just googled "facebook login" and the results were:

1. www.facebook.com/login.php

2. http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6147172660&topic=4...

3. apps.facebook.com/onthefarm (apparently many people go straight there and are hit with the login, this is the url for Farmville)

4. www.mahalo.com/facebook-login

So this link is the first non-facebook link. I bet they get some good page views from it.

But why would anyone click anything other than the top link anyway?

For the same reason why they search for "facebook login" on Google.

How do they get enough PageRank to be the top non-facebook link?

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