Mashable caught the drop on this big news story. Joost has accidently leaked 3 months worth of deals that are in the works via a Powerpoint presentation that was converted to PDF.

Frantic Industries has the quick and dirty as to how this happened. The person developing the presentation placed text boxes on top of other text, rather than deleting the original text. When this presentation was converted to PDF, the convertor saw this hidden text, placed in on the page, then placed the new text on top of it. Visually, they look the same - but when you copy-paste, you copy all of the text on the page - including the hidden data.

A similar incident led to a change in Department of Defense policies, when a declassified document was released. The document had been red-acted by placing black boxes over sensitive data, unfortunately the copy-paste trick worked like a charm and you could view the complete document. After that incident, the Department of Defense enforces a “physical red-act” policy, where the document must be printed, physically red-acted with a pen, and then scanned as a PDF.

Techquila Shots has the full text of the Joost document for your reading pleasure. To be honest, there’s no a whole lot that is interesting in here apart from a few deals in the works with Warner Brothers, the NHL, Red Bull, etc.

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The rumor mill is in full spin today, as various sources have announced Google’s plans to acquire Feedburner. The acquisition really makes sense - Google is the king of online advertising but has yet to really dive into the RSS market.

A lot of advertising real estate is never even seen, thanks to RSS, the technology behind most of Feedburner’s services. Google would have the opportunity to bring their various advertising products back into many user’s “field of vision” with an RSS advertising product - not to mention giving publishers another form of monetization.

Feedburner also offers a Google Analytics competitor, with their Site Stats Dashboard. An acquisition would bring one more competitor into the fold, which is how Google developed the Analytics product to begin with (the acquisition of Urchin building the product, and the Measure Map acquisition bringing about the latest version). A Feedburner acquisition could lead to a newer version of Analytics that would include a vast array of RSS statistics and analysis (not to mention giving Google direct access to literally thousands of RSS feeds).

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Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture, Truemors, has launched. Unfortunately, like others, I can’t help but think this is completely useless.

I’ve been a part of the beta for two weeks now and it has really taken a great deal of respect for Guy not to blog about this until the launch. Truemors allows users to post a rumor (that I guess should be true? No real guidance here) via a variety of methods: either by phone, text message, email, or simply filling out a form online.

The filtering on the website is non-existent, there’s not even a digg-style “knowledge of the masses” buffer. Whatever you post gets displayed. As you can guess, the site is full of insightful tidbits such as: “Truemors got my girlfriend pregnant” or “it’s easy to spam this site” (which got deleted during the writing of this article).

When first visiting the site you are presented with the Latest Truemors, the most prominent portion of the site, and where the most retardation exists. To the right is a sidebar housing the Greatest Truemors, but there’s no explanation as to how these items are selected. Once a rumor falls off of the Latest page it is archived within a category.

Like many others, I am left wondering - would anyone care if this wasn’t backed by Guy? I’m pretty sure Truemors would receive absolutely zero attention if someone like myself launched it.

Oh well, in 3 months it will be in TechCrunch’s Deadpool anyways - so enjoy it while it lasts.

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Here at Betaflow, we love Google’s RSS Reader, aptly named Google Reader. One of the less used features within Google Reader is actually one of the neatest - the ability to share an article with the world, with the click of a single link.

When your decide to share an entry it is automatically posted to your Google Reader Shared Items page (view mine here). The URLs for this pages are pretty hideous (Google, get us some friendly URLs please). You can figure out your shared URL by clicking on the “Shared Items” link in the top-left and following the instructions Google provides in the yellow box.

In addition to being able to share these items a publicly accessible page, you can also add a widget to your website displaying your shared items. Google offers various levels of customization (as they always do) such as theming, the number of items to display, and even the ability to reference the source of the item.

I’ve added the Google Shared Items here on Betaflow (see the sidebar when viewing the home page), where I will highlight some of my favorite articles as I run through my feeds.

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Quibblo.com is new service that allows users to create polls, quizzes, and surveys quickly and easily. In addition to being able to create a poll on Quibblo.com, users can include a widget on their website (personal blog, MySpace, whatever - Quibblo offers various copy-paste snippets for use).

The interface is well designed, stepping you quickly through the process of creating your desired widget. Polls are one question items that have no right or wrong answer and are used to gauge public opinion; surveys are similar to polls, but have more than one question; categories are similar to surveys but attempt to place the user within a particular category (ie. What kind of shopper are you?); and finally, quizzes are multi question items that have correct reponses (think trivia).

Quibblo does a good job of keeping your attention as well. As soon as you visit their homepage you are presented with a poll, as well as a list of the most popular polls and quizzes currently. After voting you are presented with the results as well as a list of polls other people took (similar to Amazon’s “other users who bought this item also bought” feature) as well as a list of polls similar to the one you just took.

All polls, quizzes, and surveys can be tagged and are then displayed in an easy to browse tag cloud. Search is of course incorporated, as well as a StumbleUpon-esque Random feature which will take you to a random item across the site.

Registration is not required to take any of the surveys, but if you want to create your own you will be required to register. The information collected is minimal and only requires a quick email verification.

I am slightly concerned about the monetization of this service. If Quibblo gains popularity the bandwidth coming from their widgets and direct access to the site could create some pretty large bills. Right now there are a few advertisements throughout the site and I thought I saw a pop-under during the research for this review (bad, Quibblo - bad!).

I think some social networking features would be a great addition to this service. The ability to connect to other users who create polls and surveys similar to your own could lead people to meet some great new friends. In addition, Quibblo implements some great looking pie charts on their website, but when you embed the widget on your site you only get the plan-old bar graph display (circa 1997). Quibblo competitors have really done a great job of making the polling process look slick as well as offering the user a variety of styling options - Quibblo really needs to step it up in this respect. Styling of your widget is possible - with some HTML and CSS knowledge - but the average user won’t have the ability to do this and Quibblo should implement an easy way to accomplish this.

All in all, Quibblo is an excellent service that fills a niche that isn’t that competitive at this point. I see various places they can improve but Quibblo allows you to fulfill your polling needs very quickly with no fuss.

Disclosure: Betaflow.com was compensated for this review.

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Steve Poland just published IDEA #57A - Social Networking via your RSS subscriptions, a guest blogger post authored by myself. If you have yet to check out TechquilaShots I highly encourage you to do so now. Steve publishes some excellent ideas for startups, many of which could easily turn a profit and be developed in-house with little funding.

As I’ve been been known to say, “Your idea isn’t worth shit, it’s the execution that pays off.”

I’m interested in further opportunities to act as a guest blogger. If you are interested, please contact me.

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In January 2001 Hot or Not added simple dating features to their “rate me” website. Users were presented with a picture and asked whether they would like to meet that person - when two people matched, they were invited to become subscribers so they could send messages to one another. This feature, as well as advertising revenue and virtual flower sales, turned $600,000 per month for James and Jim (the founders of Hot or Not), but they have now decided to go another route.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has posted a thorough article outlining Hot or Not’s changing business model - one that would have saved me a few dollars in August of 2006. It was at that time I matched with the most beautiful girl in the world and literally had no choice but to pay for a membership so I could email her. 4 months later, that girl would be my wife, and it’s been happily ever after since.

With the recent social networking boom, James and Jim have decided to drop their subscription options and rely on advertising as well as special gift purchases as their sole source of income. Hot or Not was in a bind - the decision to open up their most profitable feature and making it free was a hard one, but if Hot or Not was to continue to grow it was necessary. Since the changes were made, Hot or Not has seen a 60% increase in traffic which has boosted their other forms of income to compensate for the $500k per month loss.

James and Jim have announced that more features will be coming in the next few weeks - which is a promising outcome of the changes. Hot or Not has remained fairly stagnant throughout the years, bringing few new features to the table, but with the increased attention it has been receiving the users will expect more from this pre-dot.bomb company.

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