One of the first questions we had to answer before implementing this tool was which social bookmarking tools our users might be using. So we drew up a table of the Alexa traffic ranks of 38 social bookmarking sites we have heard of to see which ones are used most commonly. Given that Just Landed is currently available in 8 languages, we were especially interested in multilingual social bookmarking sites or at least bookmarking sites in languages other than English.

The concept of social bookmarking started in the US and been widespread there since then, so we were not really surprised that the main social bookmarking portals are English language sites. There is obviously a little bias in our analysis as the Alexa toolbar (which measures the traffic rank) is mainly used in English-speaking countries, but nevertheless we came up with some interesting finds:

• The gap between the usage of English-speaking Social bookmarking sites and the sites in other languages is immense. In the top 10 social bookmarking sites according to Alexa, there is not a single non-English site. This indicates the social bookmarking is still mainly an English-speaking phenomen.
• However, on some English-speaking social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, we also found quite a high number of non-English links and descriptions (i.e. to German or French sites). This means that the English bookmarking sites are also intensively used by non-English and/or multilingual users.
• Among the non-English sites, there is an absolute dominance of German social bookmarking sites, with the absolute leader being Mister Wong (which also includes a lot of non-German links by now). Of the 10 non-English bookmarking sites that made it into our list 7 were German (see red cells in the table attached), and 5 of these site have an Alexa traffic rank higher than 100.000 (in fact, the only non-English sites which reach these Alexa ranks are German ones). This ones again confirms that the Germans might not be very innovative in creating new web models, but have become extremely fast and efficient when it comes to adopting successful models from the US (some people even call them the “German copycats” for that reason).

So where does this leave us? First of all, we might have missed some important non-English or multilingual social bookmarking sites in our analysis, so if you have any suggestions, these are more than welcome!

Second of all, given that quite a few people use English sites for managing non-English links and non-English site for managing English links, there might not be a clear “national dominance” in the social bookmarking markets, but rather a multinational phenomen. However, this leaves us with the questions why sites like del.icio.us don’t offer at least a multingual interface for international people (although we know from our experience that creating a multilingual site is everything is easy).

And which bookmarking tools have we chosen for Just Landed? Just check out our site and see for yourself … ;o)

Bad posts will normally fall into one of the following categories (if you want to find out more about this, check out our article Stay safe online):

1. Fraud: current favourites of the spammers include: imaginary flats for rent, puppies/parrots/etc for ‘free’ adoption and bargain-priced luxury cars.
2. Spam: standard stuff like pron, pills and multi-level marketing schemes.
3. SEO rubbish: people putting up ads of little relevance to our users (normally in the wrong country, category, etc).

All of these things are detrimental to the user experience we provide. Before we launched, we did a fair amount of work to automatically identify bad posts. To a point this worked, even if it did need some manual work to look through. This is OK for the posts we could automate for. The big problem is the fraudsters are not stupid, so they have upped their game and are adapting texts and stealing pictures from real posts. As these ads are being submitted manually and the content is the same as what is being written by real users, it is hard to identify automatically. We do have many users reporting fraud when they see it, but we see this as a second line of defence – ideally people should not see bad posts in the first place.

When looking at the fraudulent activity and combining geolocation into the data, we found some obvious trends in there and this is where the [non politically-correct] name of The ‘Nigerian Problem’ comes from. 98% of the activity originating from there was identified as fraudulent. This country is not alone as Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana feature highly – there is also lots of bad activity originating in Europe (strangely Sweden seems to be a hotspot) and the US, but this is less in terms of percentages.

So this correlation is useful, but how can we use it to help prevent fraud on websites?  One internal suggestion [even less politically-correct] was to just block posts from West Africa. Obviously this is the equivalent of sweeping the dust under the sofa – it doesn’t really solve anything – which creates the new problem of excluding some of the poorest and most disadvantaged people on the planet. No, I don’t think Nigerians are ‘bad’ people – the wealth disparities and endemic corruption in what should not be a poor country are some of the root causes of this problem. This is not a ‘Nigerian Problem‘, it is an Intenet Problem. Everyone involved in Internet services needs to get better at working out how to block bad people. This is a hard problem.

Our end conclusion came to that we would have to factor geolocation into the process we have for sifting out bad posts, as this will help as an indicator. We also realised we are going to need to get a lot better at doing this in general if the amount of activity keeps increasing by the current rate of 5-10%/week.