Kinda feel like a jerk on this one. Wasn't really expecting to be able to nuke it so easily.<p><pre><code> ab -c 30 -n 3000 http://www.blinklink.me/b/4XIxfoeF4C0
Concurrency Level: 30
Time taken for tests: 93.802 seconds
Complete requests: 3000
Failed requests: 2137
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 2137, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Requests per second: 31.98 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 938.024 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 31.267 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 182.47 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 116 165 165.9 122 1276
Processing: 137 771 624.6 625 6827
Waiting: 132 733 595.7 601 6823
Total: 254 936 644.7 789 7062
</code></pre>
Perhaps should have "view" throttling per IP. Quite a few mechanisms could have solved my abuse.
I'm not sure if the submitter created BlinkLink, but I hope the author had fun making it. It's a neat idea, and it exploits human psychology in clever ways. I like how the reward for tweeting increases as the number of views remaining goes down. Also, people are driven to share the link with their friends <i>immediately</i> since they know views remaining are scarce.<p>That said, it's pretty easy to mirror content. In case the link is dead, <a href="http://i.imgur.com/KGo7oRH.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/KGo7oRH.jpg</a> is what was on the page originally.<p>Oh, and I found a UI annoyance. On the front page (<a href="http://www.blinklink.me/" rel="nofollow">http://www.blinklink.me/</a>), the blue "Make a BlinkLink" button at the top that says is just a link to blinklink.me. The bottom button (which is a less-noticeable white) actually posts the form. You should probably hide the top button on the front page.
This is like Snapchat for the web, except it's too easy to take a screenshot of the content which means there's not much of a point to the view limit.<p>You could make it difficult perhaps by requiring the user follow a path with their mouse, otherwise white noise appears. That way they cannot actually move their cursor to take a screenshot. Maybe do something else to occupy one of their other hands, such as pressing a series of keys. Of course someone else could be standing there ready to push the "print screen" button or use a camera, like you can with Snapchat. Don't forget a time limit.
I disagree with other posters, I think this is a great concept. It would be fantastic for brands to share promotional offers and voucher codes as people would have to tweet to revive access to the code therefore spreading the promo further.
This could become a bit more useful if you could add clickable links in the message. Or other files (like PDF) instead of an image. Or if it worked in the opposite direction - "tweet to decrease the number of available views". Why? To create some kind of scarcity, if the content is really valuable.
I wonder how adding a link to who "sponsored" the content your viewing (if available) would change things. It's interesting how a tweets are now currency.
zut, we could still make it appear back with a tweet. I hoped to make it disappear for good.<p>But the conclusion is that it is easier to click reload twenty times than to tweet a single message.