Plumber vs. programmer: a face-off over an online directory

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/11/plumber_vs_programmer_a_face_off_over_an_online_directory.html

by chuck_taylor • 17 years ago

47 42 17 years ago

"Conklin's missive raises an interesting point: Do businesses (or individuals for that matter) have any control over what's published or said about them on third-party directory sites? And do businesses have control over the phone numbers being represented to the public?"

Yes, when its a material misrepresentation of the facts. Putting up a false phone number for a company is not only unethical, its fraudulent. To me, the element that makes the deceitful nature of their actions clear is that they didn't contact the business owner first.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

It's "passing off" a slightly weaker part of trademark law. They are pretending to the public that their service is that of someone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off - written from the UK perspective, it's certainly part of EU TM law too, but I don't know enough about US TM law to comment properly on this.

imraj• 17 years ago

I think techies got it wrong this time.

auston3• 17 years ago

I beg to differ, how can they TRULY measure the value of their service if they aren't tracking a highly relevant action such as phone calls?

Especially if they are supposed to be getting paid per call.

chuck_taylor• 17 years ago

They're not getting paid per call. It's just for metric purposes.

jamesbritt5• 17 years ago

How does their want for data make this ethical?

thinkzig• 17 years ago

They can truly measure the value of the service by charging for it and seeing what service providers are willing to pay.

All the fake phone number does is measure how many phone leads the site generates, but it does nothing to measure the value of those leads. What if it generates 30 leads a month from consumers that are a bad fit for the service provider? On the other hand, what if it's 3 leads a month that turn into valuable business?

I'm with the plumber on this one. If you're trying to gain favor with a business you don't do it by hijacking their name and representing them as something they are not.

HelpHive got this one wrong.

dstorrs• 17 years ago

What left me puzzled was why HelpHive didn't simply de-list Conklin with an apology and a statement that it wasn't their intent to harm his business. It seems that this would have been the ethical thing to do, and would have resulted in some good publicity for them.

jamesbritt5• 17 years ago

"It seems that this would have been the ethical thing to do, and would have resulted in some good publicity for them."

HelpHive doesn't seem so big on on the whole "ethical thing".

shpxnvz• 17 years ago

Yeah, but regardless of ethics it seems like an incredibly small price to pay to avoid negative publicity and a possible lawsuit.

nym4• 17 years ago

I worked for a major online car company (like edmunds, autotrader) and wanted to do the same thing with our dealership directory.

It seems to me the same as someone saying "Where can I find a Toyota dealership in Mountain View, CA?" and replying "Here you go, call this number if you want me to introduce you two!". The routed call might say to the dealer when he picked up "Lead provided by SuperHappyCars.com!" before letting the two parties talk to each other. This would help dealerships see the impact ROI based advertising had, in the lowest tech way possible.

Nothing wrong with that, although I can see how it could be abused too, routing calls to the highest bidder instead of the advertised party.

pyre3• 17 years ago

I think the issue here is that someone viewing HelpHive's website would be under the impression that the phone number provided on the listing for "Mountain View Toyota" is their direct number, and not a 'proxy' number that redirects them.

What happens when HelpHive screws up their phone service and loses customers for "Mountain View Toyota" because they got no connection or a 'line disconnected' message?

What happens when the customer puts the 'proxy' number in their phonebook and calls it whenever they want to call "Mountain View Toyota?" When happens when a majority of "Mountain View Toyota" customers have the proxy phone number in their phone? Now it looks like there is a lot of phone traffic coming from HelpHive, but it's grossly exaggerated because you have people using the number multiple times (rather than once when they first find the business through HelpHive).

nym4• 17 years ago

I agree that you have to clear about "connecting" the customer to the business, not providing the direct number. In some ways this is better than a regular phone number because if the business' number does change, the proxied number could stay the same.

The gross exaggeration you're referring to is something that's easily overcome though by tracking total calls vs unique calls. Also you get great stats like how long the customer was on the phone for, and I imagine if they hung up or were hung up on.

Turns out many businesses want this kind of data to better improve their customer service. You would not believe how many leads are purchased, and never acted upon, just because the salespeople are lazy.

mrduncan• 17 years ago

Although not quite the same situation, this reminds me of the fiasco around GetSatisfaction at the beginning of the year.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540540

dschobel2• 17 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Although when you think about it, fundamentally it's no different than Yelp or Zaggats. It's just another level of service layered on top of a directory.

jfager4• 17 years ago

Service for whom? It doesn't serve the business - I'm sure they'd much rather people contact them directly - and it doesn't serve the customer - who wants to deal with a middleman when your toilet's overflowing? The only one served by this is the middleman, who gets to hijack leads and extort businesses.

mdasen• 17 years ago

No, GetSatisfaction is different. The business model of Yelp or Zaggats is to sell ad space or books or whatnot. The business model of GetSatisfaction is to get companies to pay them so that the company can take down negative information about itself.

With Yelp, there is no option for a business to pay them $100 per month so that you can take down bad reviews of your restaurant. That's a fundamental difference. GetSatisfaction has a desire to get users writing things on their site so that the company their writing about gets over a barrel where they have to pay them "protection money" to remove bad things people complain about their service. And $100 isn't much for the ability to silence a bunch of people bad-mouthing your service.

GetSatisfaction's wording has even tried to push the point using phrasing like "X is not yet participating" and "X has not yet committed to open conversation about its products and services" (which used to be their tagline). They both try to make it sound like they've approached X and X has declined to participate. That's different from a review site where users can say what they want, but there's no claim that the place being reviewed has declined to participate.

If you allow users to post negative things about a business, fine. If you allow users to post negative things about a business and then go to that business and ask them for $100/mo to silence those negative things, not fine.

If you allow companies to participate in the conversation and say, "we have no affiliation with X" for the companies who have nothing to do with your forum, fine. If you make it sound like the company is trying to avoid your forum because they're scared of the truth, not fine.

The devil's in the details. Here, HelpHive is trying to put themselves in a position where users have their number for places of business rather than that place of business' number. In the future, there's nothing to stop them from adding ads for competitors (and offering to connect the caller to that competitor) or worse, if they're really successful and become an online directory that a lot use, holding customers for ransom.

What it comes down to is truth. GetSatisfaction is obscuring the truth by allowing companies to moderate for a price and by using misleading language about the companies who aren't paying them. HelpHive is obscuring the truth by telling customers that their number is the number of the business they want to call. People don't get uppity about Yelp or Zaggats because, while a user can post an untrue review or a reviewer might have just seen a bad night, it's a lot closer to the truth and a lot more fair. If you're getting a massive amount of bad reviews on Yelp, that's not good for you, but at least Yelp isn't coming along to extort $100 out of you to get rid of those bad reviews.

jwhitlark• 17 years ago

I went and looked at the site. They list the companies' address, and below it a phone number. The layout implies that the phone number belongs to the business. If they wanted to do it the right way, they could have added something like, "contact this business via helphive".

I would call this highly unethical, at this point; it is a willful and material misrepresentation of the facts.

matrix• 17 years ago

HelpHive (the directory) is absolutely in the wrong here. Their business model is unethical at best; it's on par with spamming and link-farming.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that the founder of HelpHive is a former RealNetworks employee.

willwagner• 17 years ago

To me, unless the phone number is clearly marked that it's from HelpHive as opposed to the business, it's similar to a phishing site; it could really get delisted by google which would be the kiss of death for this company's business.

I use google all the time to quickly get contact info; I'll have to check the source a lot more carefully if this becomes a commonplace.

btilly• 17 years ago

Is it the technology or the business you are unhappy with?

When I was at Rent.com we implemented a very similar telephone system around the time that we were acquired by eBay. The critical difference was that the apartments on our site all had contracts with us and were all paying us per person actually placed in the building. Our initial implementation also didn't have an opt-out, but we had to implement that fairly quickly because of very similar issues with automated answering systems.

The main reasons that we implemented the system were to improve collection rates on our invoices, and improve the rate at which leases go reported to us. (It is amazing how many apartment building owners wanted to cheat us...)

I'm curious whether people's outrage at this technology would extend to that implementation by a different company with a much more clearly established business relationship.

jamesbritt5• 17 years ago

"I'm curious whether people's outrage at this technology would extend to that implementation by a different company with a much more clearly established business relationship."

The tech is fine. The idea of involving people without their consent is what's wrong.

It makes sense as a way to ensure tracking of referrals, but all parties need to be in agreement on it, and users need to be told that they are going through an intermediary.

tocomment• 17 years ago

The plumber just needs to trademark his business and then it's a simple case of trademark infringement, no?

nfnaaron• 17 years ago

This whole thing reminds me, also, of the GetSatisfaction pile. Bottom line at the top, I doubt if HiveMind is illegal, but I believe the phone number hijacking is unethical.

But what this also reminds me of is news organizations' objection to article links on aggregation sites. The difference, of course, is after you follow a link you're "there" (assuming you haven't been framed) and can bookmark it as you wish, and click on all the tasty advertisements.

If "all the plumber needs to do" is to trademark his business name to keep HiveMind from listing him (assuming HiveMind wouldn't just remove him by request), then wouldn't this also work for Rupert Murdoch and his ilk? [conscious use of the negative and inflammatory "ilk," with no small amount of satisfaction]

nym4• 17 years ago

It all depends on what they do with the proxied number. If they're just watching traffic, that's no less unethical than proxying a URL like Google does to see how many people click on an item in their SERP.

wgj• 17 years ago

AANAL, but I'm pretty sure he's covered by trademark law anyway, and could win in court. (In this case, I'd say _would_ win in court.) He would just not be a allowed to win damages unless registered. (He'd have to pay his own court costs.)

WesleyJohnson• 17 years ago

You know, I sometimes find it difficult to find local numbers for things like City Hall, Utility companies or even Police and Fire stations. I'm going to setup a service similar to HelpHive to help the reach these services are getting into the public and I'll list my own number so I can show them metrics about all the good things I'm doing for them. Maybe, just maybe, I'll record the call too.

Yeah, I know that's extreme, but this whole thing just reeks of wrong to me. I'm siding with the Plumber on this one.

eli_s2• 17 years ago

Wow this is just disgusting slimeball behaviour on the part of helphive. A business' phone number is an important part of it's identity. Business owners pay to have memorable numbers (repeating digits etc.) - not to mention numbers like 1800-PLUMBER to help people remember the number.

Now this mafiozi wedges himself between a legitimate local business and their clientele - it's so plainly wrong!

What happens when this bottom feeder (helphive) goes out of business? How many people have now got a number for a local business written in their diary or on the fridge, which no longer works?

This is without a doubt unethical and I imagine illigal. Let's hope there's someone out there with deep enough pockets to sue this guy into bankruptcy!

Plumber vs. programmer: a face-off over an online directory

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