Shortly after publishing the previous post, an anonymous comment was submitted via contact form of the website.

Here is what it said:

just so you know, Ms. Slader is the only employee left at Dotnext. Everyone was let go yesterday

Note to new readers: Dotnext Inc is a parent company of LeapFish.

The Contra Costa Time in fact confirms that Dotnext has been “downsizing” while quoting the CEO of the company:

….”The company has downsized,” said Ben Behrouzi, a Danville resident who is founder and principal executive at DotNext….
…At its peak a few months ago, DotNext had about 100 workers. Now it has about 15, Behrouzi estimated. Numerous employees were let go this week…

Read more »

LeapFish has been given a cold shoulder on many occasions by the leading technology blogs. However, today the things you say on the internet tend to stick around, something LeapFish management and employees fail to understand over and over again.

Ms. Slader, who according to her several online profiles is an executive assistant of Dontnext, Inc. as well as company called LeapFish.com wrote the following Tweet:

I rarely challenge people about what they say on twitter, unless their profile clearly states association with a particular company or institution.

Here is what Ms. Slader’s profile says as of the writing of this article:

Therefore my challenge to Ms. Slader was purely based on her representing a particular company, otherwise Ms. Slader would have never learned of my existence:

Ms. Slader took my comment as a threat:

While overlooking the vicious and very personal attack on my hair style (see my twitter profile picture to see what I am talking about) I would like to clarify one thing, should Ms. Slader cared enough to read this post. My tweet was not to threaten or scare anyone. What I really hoped for, in fact, was that Ms. Slader would get the hint and delete that hasty tweet, before it added more embarrassment to LeapFish’s already struggling reputation.

I also believe that Ms. Slader did not come to a conclusion that “bloggers are disgusting & twisted” on her own, but rather was influenced by her boss(es) or coworkers. Perhaps while taking notes during one of company executives meetings? Therefore it makes more difficult to explain her vicious and personal attack based on disliking my “fictional haircut”, a courtesy of YearBookYourself.com. I only wish I had such a beautiful set of hair!!!

The moral of the story??? Do you know if your secretary is active on Twitter or Facebook? Do you know what is she/he saying? Does it make your company look bad? Should you ask her/him to make their tweets private and hidden from the outside world???

In my opinion, Ms. Slader would be better off calling out, Matt Brown, Robin Wauters, Jolie O’Dell, Trace Richardson, Marshall Kirkpatrick and few others rather than making a “blanket” statements directed towards bloggers in general. Could it be that Ms. Slader is not aware of the fact that LeapFish.com awarded numbers of bloggers with Wiis, personal computers, iPads and plans to award $50,000 in cash in exchange for “good” publicity?

Disclosure: The above post is my personal opinion. No one paid or offered me any gifts to write the above posts.I believe Ms. Slader is good and hardworking individual. I believe Ms. Slader’s opinion of bloggers may have been influenced by others, perhaps even her boss(es). It is possible Ms. Slader made the above statements against her own will.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

UPDATE Feb. 5, 2010: It appears LeapFish is no longer showing the link in the footer of their website to their “directory” I wrote about bellow:

This change must have been implemented today as Bing.com’s cached page of LeapFish from yesterday February 4, 2010 still has the link:

LeapFish has also implemented robots.txt file on their website disallowing web crawlers from indexing the directory:

Few days ago I tried to to get attention of Google’s Anti-Spam Czar – Matt Cutts via his FriendFeed account. I wanted Matt to comment about LeapFish’s latest directory- but I realize, it may not be Google’s practice to comment on these sort of things publicly. That or you need to be Michael Gray, Aaron Wall or Andy Beard to get some one like Matt Cutts to listen to you.

So what is my latest beef with LeapFish? Their spammy directory located at http://www.leapfish.com/dr/ – my apologies for not providing a live link, I consider LeapFish to be an unsafe website. It also appears by my estimates that Google is indexing this new directory at the rate of about 50 pages a day- there are about 200 pages in Google’s index from this “directory” as of this writing.

So I invite those who are still with me to explore some of the pages from the above mentioned directory. One of the first pages from the directory that jump at me was “Shopping”:

Clicking through to the page on LeapFish.com you are given opportunity to “narrow” your search- so I decide to narrow mine to “Death Care”:

What do you know?!!! Now you can narrow your search geographically- naturally I selected New Jersey the state I live in:

How about that?!! LeapFish knows all the counties in the state of New Jersey- naturally my next selection would be the county I live in:

How about that?!!! Turns out LeapFish is so intuitive it knows about every city in my state- so just for the heck of it I decided to check and see what kind of death care shopping I can do in Jackson, NJ:

And the relevancy of my final destination in LeapFish directory? Google search results associated with the death of Michael Jackson?

What can I say? I am extremely disappointed. I am sure few results of local funeral directors or even a local WalMart with the line of their latest caskets would not be as disappointing. Since LeapFish is using some APIs from Google, they could have really impress me by showing me a few relevant products using Google Base API.

So yeah, I am desperate for the attention from Matt Cutts. Matt could you please explain to me how this sort of “directories” improve the State of The Index? In my opinion the LeapFish Directory does just the opposite- LeapFish pollute the Internet.

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

About a year ago TechCrunch, world’s leading technology blog, wrote about threats of click fraud LeapFish employee used to intimidate potential clients into advertising on a newly launched meta search aggregator. The CEO of LeapFish, Ben Behrouzi, fired back with an emotional response, in which he seems to be “calling out” TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters for being “irresponsible and distasteful”. The original post appeared on February 4, 2009 at www.benbehrouzi.org – what seams to be personal blog of the CEO of LeapFish.

The rebuttal was taken down some time at the beginning of this year, 2010. The link http://www.benbehrouzi.org/2009/02/04/leapfish-gets-second-lashing-from-techcrunc/ seams to point to a page that no longer exists. The rebuttal was referenced by “online authorities” like Wikipedia.

It is possible that the post containing the rebuttal was taken by mistake. But in case it was taken on purpose, bellow is the copy of the original post minus the updates:

LeapFish Gets Second Lashing, Beginning to Think TechCrunch Just Doesn’t Like Us

Today TechCrunch covered LeapFish for the second time, but unfortunately they again did not focus on the engine itself or its future. Instead of discussing our new click free search technology or our recent increase in traffic, or the sheer number of advertisers/investors that have joined the program, Techcrunch made news out of an irresponsible act committed by 1 out of 80 sales representatives that we employ and set us up for ridcule instead. I was very disappointed at the way they handled this to say the least.

I’m beginning to think they just don’t like us. I hope I’m wrong. I did offer the following response, which I haven’t seen posted as of yet.

Robin,

We have completed an investigation and have dealt with the matter appropriately. However frankly put, I am disappointed at this post by you and by TechCrunch. You never contacted us to verify the information you posted or even checked to see what our position was as a company around such behavior before you published. You apparently called in but didn’t make the effort of speaking with someone about this. Frankly put, I find your post’s title and content irresponsible and distasteful. Nevertheless, I apologize for the poor choice in judgment by one of our sales representatives and we want your readers to know that we took swift and immediate action to correct the matter.

Additionally, we have called, spoken to and offered a sincere apology to the prospect that was mistreated. We have expressed our regret and embarrassment over the situation. We have also offered to pay restitution for any fees the prospect incurred and will cover any damages. Additionally, we will be offering a gift of a keyword of the prospect’s choice as a further sign of our apologetic stance.

Let me clearly state, that LeapFish has a 0 tolerance policy for the behavior described and in no way, shape or form endorses the behavior whatsoever. Our sales staff is not coached nor encouraged to engage in such tactics and this is a regrettable act by a single individual who exercised poor judgment using personal email accounts. Our entire sales staff has been met with and spoken to and been firmly reminded that we do not engage in such tactics nor will we tolerate it whatsoever.

Robin, I find your post unfair and damaging, but I harbor no ill will towards you and I hope that one day one of your posts will actually give fair attention to our true offering and features, as provided by Silicon Valley’s MercuryNews and the thousands of visitors, supporters, investors and advertisers of LeapFish.

I would be more than happy to discuss with you why LeapFish has a bright future, the real business model, its time horizon for delivering ROI and the expectations communicated to our thousands of advertisers/investors.

Thanks again.

Best,
Ben Behrouzi
CEO
DotNext Inc.

I personally have no interest in Wikipedia, but if you are a fan, you should make an attempt to correct the reference #8 on the following page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeapFish

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

Update Nov. 9, 2009: It appears that LeapFish is no longer using framesets on their website.

A mention by US Today, stream of hundreds of Tweets , mentioned by hundreds of blogs, a “cutting edge” video on youtube- LeapFish.com relaunch can certainly be seen as enormous success, except…

The leading technology blogs continue to give LeapFish.com nothing short of a “cold shoulder”.

All the buzz surrounding the relaunch is focused on how sexy and nice looking the new website is, no one seems to be trying to “flip beyond the cover page”.

I would like to write about LeapFish’s implementation of framesets on their pages that may actually spook an unseasoned Internet user into believing that they are visiting unsecured websites.

If you search LeapFish for “Read Write Web” for example, the website returns nice clean results with the most relevant link in number one position:

Considering the average user expectation, most of us would expect to land on http://www.readwriteweb.com/ – it is however not the case with LeapFish. After clicking the the link you end up on a nice lookng LeapFish page which embeds (via frameset) the content from The Read Write Web and the LeapFish bar at the bottom of the page:

While visitors to The Read Write Web may not care at all. Visitors to websites like Amazon can get confused and and may be led to believe that shopping on Amazon and other websites are no longer secure. Let me show you an example of what I mean. The following shot is of my Amazon account page while accessing the website directly (typing http://www.amazon.com into my browser):

The HTTPS as well as the lock icon are the basic signs by which an average internet can identify whether or not website is secure.

Now the screenshot of the same page but via frameset on LeapFish.com:

Both HTTPS and lock icons are missing. And the URL clearly says you are still on LeapFish.com. Even though I consider myself an above average Internet user, before I logged into my Amazon account via the frameset on LeapFish I had to check the code of the page first:

I wanted to know if my Amazon login info is safe with LeapFish. How many users do you think will do that?

Potential Issues With Google?

AdSense users can tell you how tough Google is when it comes to enforcing terms and condition and how easy it is to get banned. Google Search API TOS do not address the use framesets- so if you know if use of framesets allowed please enlighten me:

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.