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.
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.
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.