I remember installing MyAdvantage on all my friend's machines in a dorm at UCLA. You got paid if the mouse was moving and you kept surfing. So someone made MyAdvantage, a program to move the mouse and auto refresh your brower. A made a few hundred dollars :)
That was me. When I wrote it, I didn't know millions of people would download it and would spawn the auto-surf genre of apps. It ended up making me ranked 15 on their pyramid with over 60,000 people underneath me. During the hey-day, I was getting great checks -- not bad for a 16 year old back then. I also ended up being a consultant for them. I still keep in contact with the guys there who have since moved on, but thanks for the good memories -- glad to know people still remember one of the things I wrote!
You're a legend. You're soley responsible for thousands of high schoolers (including me) carrying over $100 in their wallet for the first time in their lives. Thank you.
Haha, thanks! Some other projects I did was i2hub (largest college p2p), Lancraft (warcraft hack), Nestea2 (large scale security issue), scenereview (ranked higher than craigslist before I sold it), irc admin at the oldest efnet server irc.colorado.edu, and a bunch of others. MyAdvantage ("Get Paid to Sleep") was one of the projects that was most used, but never seen... ;-) I'm also involved in the dispute between ConnectU and Facebook, but that is coming to a head relatively shortly...
i2hub? Quite possibly the best service ever... God do I miss i2hub and my Internet 2 connection. The University of Pittsburgh basically owns the backbone for Pittsburgh, it really was a 100MB connection to the internet with no bandwidth caps.
A friend of mine was sued by the RIAA for having music available on i2hub about a week before it shut down... did they infiltrate it without your knowledge? Or did University administrators let them on? I'd be very curious to hear about the end of i2hub, by email if this forum isn't appropriate.
Yup, it was pretty wild. MyAdvantage was the first of its kind back then, before all the clones came out. It still did the best job, in my opinion. I remember a few times I had to duck out of some classes when I was a junior in high school and go to the boy's room to attend a conference meeting because there was some crazy new attack on the ViewBar. This was before cell phones were popular and inexpensive. Before they ran out of business, they still owed me about $26K for that month. Kept delaying, and then they went bankrupt.
Actually, could you leave some of your recollections in the comment form on the original article? In the "Where are they now" series on The Industry Standard, we often have former customers and employees leaving notes about their experiences, which provide an interesting contrast to the high-level views given by the company founders we interview.
I remember signing up for this as a kid, thinking I was going to make a few extra bucks each month. Little did I know that the pay didn't even cover the phone bills I racked up using dialup.
I never made any serious money with AllAdvantage (less than 40 or 50 dollars total) - but I was in pretty active on a message board with people that were earning serious cash. The people with several thousand referalls were sometimes pulling in several thousands of dollars in monthly checks (albeit, only about 6 months maybe.)
Say what you will, that's a hell of a return for basically putting an affliate link up on a busy website (one guy was running a basic wallpaper website.) AllAdvantage might have gone bankrupt, but it paid out $49 mil to a lot of small site owners in one year. That's pretty cool.
