Placing icon on user's desktop linking to my site...

I think you should rethink your idea, placing a link or icon on someones machine without them wanting it will not only loose you visitors but can get you wiped off the net.

best way is to have a simple note saying "dont forget to bookmark my site" or a "refer a friend link"

I've been spending about 12 hours a day on average on my computer for the last two years. Times are tough. I need to make money. I'd dread to think how much I've making per hour from my content-rich web sits - certainly far less than someone flipping burgers in McDonalds.

If people are downloading 100% free e-books from my servers, I don't think it's unfair to place one icon on their desktop to my web site. Do you think that's being unfair?

Furthermore, most of the big companies do it, so why I can't I? I downloaded printer drivers from HP and they added a link to their online store onto my desktop. At least my icon will be to a site packed full of content, not a shopping site.

Most webmasters have very few morals, certainly less than me. Being a Muslim, I have NEVER placed a link to any site promoting anything that I perceive to be immoral e.g. gambling or credit card sites (interest is exploitative as we shall see in the forthcoming recession). How many sites profit from flogging 'Playboy' magazine? It's lost me a lot in revenue, but I don't care.

Yahoo, Microsoft, CNN and the others have no qualms about placing gambling links on their sites... there was a recent article I read somewhere about gambling having entered the mainstream in America because of the web, whereas once it was considered to be 'seedy'.

Compared to a barrage of gambling pop-unders at Yahoo, placing one solitary icon to a high-brow general literature site on somebody's desktop when they are receiving a free download from me is surely not immoral is it?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand - can anyone who doesn't think I'm as evil as Darth Vader tell me how to do it?

Quote: Originally posted by 1lit.com

Most webmasters have very few morals, certainly less than me.

You can't categorize people that way. Some webmasters have no morals or very little at all. Some are quite moral. Most are probably a little in between. Some even sign up for banner ads without knowing what ads they will be presenting.

The question is which camp will you put yourself in. You are mistaken about programs putting icons on your desktop linking to their site. Most don't do this, except for AOL, MSN, etc. Most icons loaded on your desktop are links to the program that was installed on your local hard drive. I keep my desktop clear of icons that get loaded there. If I downloaded an ebook from you and I got an icon to your site on my desktop, I would drag it to the trash, first. Then probably delete the ebook since I would be pretty ticked. I think that you would have similar reactions from others. Aside from the morals of it, I really could see very little gain from doing this. Any gain would be greatly offset by the negative reaction from this.

My advice is try something else.

Here's the article about gambling having hit the mainstream by Jupiter Media Metrix by the way:

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905357681&rel=true

"... Back then, most online advertisements for casinos ran on small gambling sites but now 39 percent of online casino ads run on portal sites.

Jupiter also found that a third of all traffic to casino sites comes from work users, and that 13.6 million people visited casino sites in December 2001."

The top bid at [url=http://www.overture.com/d/search/;$sessionid$ZE25HNAACK1Z5QFIEOSAPUQ?type=home&tm=1&Keywords=casino]Overture[/url] for 'casino' is currently $14.24 - shows how much money there is to be made if you have no scruples.

The point is not to base your own morals on what everyone else is doing. I learned a long time ago that if I had to ask myself or others whether or not something was right, it usually was wrong for me. What you are doing is shopping around for someone to say 'Yeah that's okay. Go for it.' That way you can attempt to justify what you are doing. But still the point from my previous post is that it would not drive any more traffic to your site and would probably drive more away.

I would also be interested in placing Icons on users desktops, but in a Slightly different way.
I would like my users to choose to place an Icon on their desktop & when clicked would take them to my support pages & automatically log them in. (SO somehow it would include their name and password in the link)

Any ideas on this ??

Mika

The concept of having an icon on the desktop is not a bad one -- it's the involuntary part that is bad.

I don't know how to do it, so I'm not just holding out on you, but you might want to figure out how to get people to want to save the page/file to your desktop.

In your case, Yabber, it would make sense for them, so a help page walking them through the process would be the most logical thing for you to do. Have the page set a cookie for auto-login, not through an url, however, as it's very insecure.