Yes, it is scummy. I sure don't set up many outlinks to sites that frame other sites. I don't recommend them actively in online discussion either. I would never set up framing like that in any site I administer.

That's why I've never really liked about.com. Looking into it, it seems like all the content has been paid for by about.com. But content on their sites has appeared elsewhere, and it looks like they frame content, so it's just distasteful.

I do think it can be done well though. Isitfunnytoday.com frames content. They are a web comic aggregator that lets people vote on web comics. On all their out going links, they have a very small frame that lets you vote on the displayed comic, vote on a different comic, and share the the comic on websites like digg. The bar is not invasive, and you can easily get rid of it by clicking the red x. It also helps that isitfunnytoday.com is actually sending more traffic to the other site.

I don't think it hurts your SEO–since it's framing your page at the same URL. Google is smart enough to know that the frame comes from your site/blog.

Honestly, I don't think you should be too concerned about it. After all, RSS readers, blog search engines, news search engines, meme aggregators, and other sites all scrape content and republish it (in whole or part) in their own pages–often profiting from ads at the same time. Is that any less shady to you?

I'd say just make sure your pages clearly define you as the content creator. People will get the idea.

In some of those cases, the practice is just as shady. In others, not as much.

I don't use an RSS reader personally and never will. I visit the sites I like so they can recoup advertising views from me reading the stories they paid real money to professionals to write.

I also don't like how RSS readers make every story look the same no matter where it comes from. It loses personality.

I think newspapers are partly in their current situation because they didn't sue the pants off Google or charge for their sites to be spidered 10 years ago, before the public grew comfortable with the practice. Google got all their data for free.

If I'm expected to pay Twitter for use of their API, surely I could have been expected to pay the NYTimes to spider their site and store local copies of all their content.

1 - It doesn't hurt SEO. Sure, a directly link would be better, but a framed one is better than nothing. If it creates duplicate content problems, it's for the framer, not the framed.

2 - No. Why do you think it might do?

3 - No, I hate them too :) Except isitfunnytoday.com, because, you see... that's the problem. Sometimes you can clearly see value being added by the framer. But these are rare, most framers do it to stick the users, log activity or show ads.

1. Ok. Good to know. Still seems scummy because...

2. They're adding their branding/user experience to your site, usually up at the top, in an effort to brand your content as their own.

According to think link: http://www.publaw.com/framing.html

There was a lawsuit back in 1999 in which some news orgs sued the pants off a site that was framing their content and running ads around it.

Outbrain doesn't appear to be running ads, but it's definitely adding UI elements and "login" and "about" links that I wouldn't want anywhere on my site. That's why I wonder if there's grounds for legal challenge, the user experience is being co-opted without prior consent.

Hey brandnewlow - I'm the founder of outbrain... thought I'd drop by your conversation here. The recommendations we make in the outbrain widget are based on how readers rate blog posts. Therefore it is important to give readers the rating functionality (which is why we keep the frame). We don't promote our brand in the frame and did our best to keep the functionality and UI to the absolute minimum. Furthermore - when a reader clicks on a link to a page where our widget is installed, we don't show the frame at all as the rating functionality is already available on the page. So a good way to prevent the outbrain frame from showing up would be to install our widget on your site... ;-) (http://www.outbrain.com/get/ratings)

We don't really like frames either, and are doing whatever we can to reduce the use and minimize the UI intrusion when we do use them... but in some cases there ain't much better ways to do this... I'd appreciate any ideas for improvement.

Thanks for dropping by and joining in.

A few questions:

1. Do you request the content creator's permission before framing their site? I checked out Outbrain.com but it doesn't appear that you have any sort of submission form. I'm assuming you just index whatever sites you choose. I don't see any sort of opt-out form on your site either.

2. I understand that your model is based on getting recommendations from your users, and that you get those recommendations by framing people's sites so you can make the rating interface impossible to ignore. That's a decision on your end, not my problem as a content creator. You do not promote the brand you say, but you do promote your service and its ends.

3. As your model is based on a practice I find distasteful, I'm not sure why I'd want to install your widget.

4. What is your business model? Will you eventually sell advertising on the frames across the top of these sites once your widget is getting enough use?

5. Can you really not find a better way to engage users other than framing other people's content? Your reasoning here seems to boil down to "We can't think of a better way to do this."

I appreciate you coming in here and look forward to your responses. I don't see how a business based on framing other people's content is defensible though but I'm sure there's enough framers out there ready to prove me wrong.

Hey - before answering the specific questions, I'd take a step back and say that the ultimate judge on web services like outbrain should be the user, not the court (assuming the service is legal, and I believe that both linking and framing are perfectly legal). I think outbrain offers great value to all 3 stakeholders - the reader, the blogger installing us, and the site receiving traffic - and so I hope these stakeholders keep us honest and let us know if we're doing anything that's distasteful in their mind. If you search for references about outbrain on the web you'll find that they are all very positive.

Specifically - 1) We do not request the content creator's permission, and don't think we need to. The content we link to is published publicly, and linking to it is perfectly legal. As I mentioned before, we'll gladly block links to any site that's not interested in them promptly after getting a take-down request. (BTW - why would you expect services like outbrain to ask for upfront linking permission, but not from say Google?)

2) I think what you said is reasonable... we're in business for providing a great product and getting people to use it. I think that is fine. As for the crawling - our crawler respects your robots.txt settings, so if you wish to prevent us from indexing your site you can easily do so.

4) Our business model will likely evolve around advertising, though the frame will probably not play a major role on that. As I said above - we hope our bloggers and readers keep us honest and let us know as soon as we breach their respect of our product. Our users' loyalty is paramount to us, and we would not breach that trust too easily...

5) Any solution other than framing would require us to pull the target page and insert our code into it. That is something we would not do because that really is distasteful - for example, it would affect the site's ability to properly serve and count their ads.

Bottom line - a frame is far from perfect - I agree with you about that - but I don't think it's inherently evil if used with some care.

...also - as far as legal action goes - that won't be needed. We only use frames on traffic we send to your site in order to maintain the user experience of our service. The frames allows us to hand you this traffic, to the original site without altering it, without affecting the ads that you serve, and without scraping any parts of it. We believe that's a very fair tradeoff, but if you still find the frames unacceptable just let us know and we'll promptly stop placing recommended links pointing to your site. Just drop me a note to galai [at] outbrain [dot] com and let me know.

I've not seen any of my links on your widget. I'm speaking in the hypothetical with the legal issues. I've yet to see a fast-growing service on the web that wasn't aggressively/cleverly taking advantage of other people's content. The legal issues around this are interesting to me, which is why I raise them. I've got no interest in suing anyone at the moment, merely hearing how people justify their practices.

Google has said many times there is no duplicate content penalty. And Google actually can't read anything inside a frame, so there would be no content to duplicate anyway. Duplicate content is an issue, because you are letting Google decide which page is the most important. It is better to control for yourself which page you feel to be the most important.

It's perhaps only tolerable in situations where a site has to deal with phishing on a large scale basis, perhaps on a forum targeted towards a younger audience. And even then, only if it is only a banner which says "WARNING: Don't give out your password to sites you clicked on from us!" as well as a swift way to see the page in full.

As long as it's relatively unobtrusive and has a prominent "remove frame" button, I don't see what the big deal is. If it weren't for their link to you (framed or not), that user would not have found your content in the first place. I would be grateful for them driving traffic to your site and move on to more important issues.

"Facebook frames the destination pages for all links shared on it."

Where does Facebook do this? I just checked it with a site for a food drive that I'm advertising on my news feed, and it wasn't framed.

Click on a "posted item" in your news feed.

Example:

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=52798147212&h=...

Instead of

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipes/gallery/0,28548,1708361,00....

FB adds a blue bar across the top with the profile info of the person who shared the link.

It is shown when someone posts a link (not every external link)

Here's the only example of where I like it: http://playericious.com/

For me it boils down to whether or not the frame is adding any value to the page, unobtrusive, and easy to close.

stumbleupon is now doing this for their non-extension based experience.

StumbleUpon is an example of framing content right...a simple unobtrusive toolbar. I used that site as inspiration for a website I created during my spare time. Link: http://www.picahuna.com

I don't think there's anything necessarily scummy about framing content. In the case of StumbleUpon and my site, there's a benefit to the user experience, and visitors can immediately start using the site without installing an extension. Furthermore, StumbleUpon actually increases traffic to your site.

See, I'd be annoyed if I saw that on one of my sites.

And I understand I could be in the minority here with this discussion. It's good to hear the counter-argument from people who organize, scrape, and aggregate other people's content.

And I ask in part because my main project right now is an aggregator. There are a whole host of practices that would help from a business standpoint that I have questions about, like framing.

When I made the site I debated whether to include frames or not. The justification I used was that I as a user (not just the creator of the site) would actually want a small toolbar that would allow me to navigate quickly between aggregated sites (it aggregates image sites, so I tend to move quickly between pages), and view the sometimes funny captions people give the images.

I can understand your annoyance though. Content creators should have a choice whether to be framed or not... and they do, but like you said not a lot of people know about framing sites and/or how to break them.

My web app: http://myjugaad.in/ also does that; but then it is a slideshow for webpages