These "share your link to move up in line" things are a fun mechanic, and seem to work well for virality, but the way they're currently being implemented is embarrassingly easy to gamify.
In a line of curl and about ten minutes, I went from ~130,000 to #2 (proof: https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352). Anyone with an elementary knowledge of the Chrome web inspector and bash could do the same.
This could be halfway patched by only counting verified accounts. ie: send a verification email to everyone who signs up, and only count them if they click the link. It could still be "hacked," but it would be more tedious and require sufficiently more resources. If you're thinking about doing something like this for your startup launch, please at least verify email addresses.
A full solution would have to depend on something that could verify that an account has one-and-only-one real person behind it. Perhaps linking a credit card, making a purchase, or shipping to a unique address.
I'm really interested in jet as a service, and very excited for the launch, but I'd be incredibly disappointed if my ~5k fake entries aren't discovered before the end of this competition.
As an aside: this website has really confusing UX:
1. Why does practically everything on the page flip over if I hover for ~1000ms? Things should either flip over immediately on mouse hover (which still isn't fantastic - what do you do on mobile?), or after a button press.
2. "Click to copy your unique link" doesn't work (Retina MBP OS X 10.10 Chrome 39.0.2171.95 64-bit), and only shows a pointer cursor the first time you hover over it.
3. "Click here to check your Jet Insider rank" in the welcome email doesn't have an href attribute, so the link doesn't work.
like you say, email verification can be hacked just as easily. best answer is to use some authenticated id like facebook/twitter. regardless, why would someone bother....their terms have all sorts of stuff about securits laws, signing consulting agreements with jet etc...they must be auditing anyone in the running for stock.
I'd bet that's only there to verify granting of stock options: manually going through the top ten isn't that labor intensive. There's still an advantage to getting free service for a year.
Re flash: unfortunately that's the state of the art for cross platform copying to the clipboard. Their implementation just seems broken.
In a line of curl and about ten minutes, I went from ~130,000 to #2 (proof: https://twitter.com/cgenco/status/553651179779940352). Anyone with an elementary knowledge of the Chrome web inspector and bash could do the same.
This could be halfway patched by only counting verified accounts. ie: send a verification email to everyone who signs up, and only count them if they click the link. It could still be "hacked," but it would be more tedious and require sufficiently more resources. If you're thinking about doing something like this for your startup launch, please at least verify email addresses.
A full solution would have to depend on something that could verify that an account has one-and-only-one real person behind it. Perhaps linking a credit card, making a purchase, or shipping to a unique address.
I'm really interested in jet as a service, and very excited for the launch, but I'd be incredibly disappointed if my ~5k fake entries aren't discovered before the end of this competition.
As an aside: this website has really confusing UX:
1. Why does practically everything on the page flip over if I hover for ~1000ms? Things should either flip over immediately on mouse hover (which still isn't fantastic - what do you do on mobile?), or after a button press.
2. "Click to copy your unique link" doesn't work (Retina MBP OS X 10.10 Chrome 39.0.2171.95 64-bit), and only shows a pointer cursor the first time you hover over it.
3. "Click here to check your Jet Insider rank" in the welcome email doesn't have an href attribute, so the link doesn't work.