This is the most bizarre list of "top" RIAs I've ever seen. SlideSix? How is that an RIA? Flypaper is a windows desktop app! Boks is an AIR app on version 0.3.2! Napkee? MXP3? Who has heard of these?

Where are the big guys like Picnik, SlideRocket, Blist, Scrapblog, Sproutbuilder, Lovely Charts, etc? I think only 2 of your Top 20 even made your Top 50 most usable RIA list.

It's probably because they cheated with votes... So, the rules to win are pretty simple, just: CHEAT! ;)

I agree - iPlotz went up 2000 votes in less than 4 hours. lol

I don't think anyone should vote for DIGITAL TUTORS. They technology for streaming online videos have too many bugs. Video pauses all the time and there is a buffer issue. They have admited this on their forum.

You can also check the bugs thread on their forum. Looks like these people just want to grab money rather then giving quality contents.

Most of the users on forum complained about the quality of the new releases. Almost all of them haing issues with new platform.

Most of their clients left the site because of the buggy system and they are charging people making false promises.

I do not want to sound rude, but people should try their system before voting.

I think they are right by not allowing big guys to be here. Big guys are already well known and they are on the market for many years already. It wouldn't be interesting to watch just another presentation of Picnic on AdodeMax.

As for cheating issue - it seems to be so. I watched how Yooba is growing and it is VERY suspicious. The same thing with Iplotz.
FlashMoto is under the question as well, but they seem to partner with Templatemonster and now have their "Vote for Us" banner of TM's homepage. I can believe they can generate a decent amount of legitimate traffic.

I totally agree. Yooba went from last place to first place in a few hours.
It's so sad some people do whatever it takes to win.
This could have been very interesting. Now it's just a joke.

Isn't it possible that iPlotz sent an email to all their friends, customers and family at one particular moment and that was the moment when most people voted for them?
Is it considered cheating to encourage people to vote for them? Most products on the list have some link to this poll from their own site. Does this mean that they're all cheating or does it mean that iPlotz, FlashMoto and Yooba has more friends or users than the rest or does it mean that they're better at marketing?
I'm guessing that the live vote at Adobe MAX will be the only real way of determining which of these apps should be named Best of RIA 2009.

2Roy

I think it is possible to do what you said. But how it is possible to have 500-1000 votes in just couple of hours? I 've been doing e-mail marketing with large lists of recipients for more than 5 years and I perfectly know that this is impossible to create such a buzz in a short time.

Generating 500 votes in an hour could be done only if you reach at least 7-8K of recipients and I doubt that iPlotz has such possibility.

Aviary explained how people are cheating: http://aviary.com/blog/posts/online-polls-are-not-popularity-contests

Looks like the script can be easily cheated. Lots of programmers are involved into the process. So, fixing the voting script probably will take a lot of time and won't really help. It really sucks :(.

P.S. I watched how Aviary was growing fast during first days and then stopped. Good move to go and reveal how to cheat to stay out of the game :). Pretty sure that they ran out of their resources and decided to stop everybody too.

Anyway, seeing InsideRia's Alexa trend, they still benefit from both natural and "artificial" traffic coming to their site.

Then according to Aviary's blog how will the votes from a corporate firm with 1000s of employees inside their proxy cast their votes?

I think the voting system tracks both User Agent and Ip address and compares them together. The unique combination of these both parameters is considered as a unique vote.

P.S. I've tried to use couple of free proxy servers and give some votes for outsiders (Balsamiq Mockups to prevent ruining the leaders balance) and it didn't really work. Maybe the exploit is not that easy to use?

You don't even need to use a proxy server, just use the scripting language of your choice to create an http request (5 - 10 lines of code) and modify the header to add the x-forwarded-for header (1 - 2 lines of code). You can then put in any ip address you want without using a proxy and the votes will count.

In that case it can be easily verified. InsideRia simply needs to take a look at their Web Analytics like (Google Analytics) and see how many hits has been generated by the same ip (where the script is running from).

In aviarys case we did not cheat using voting scripts. We let our property sites (ie aviary and worth1000) members know about the competition and asked them to vote for us. We pointed out how the cheating was done once we detected it and realized some sites were being flagrant about it (not naming names). But we didn't want to play that way ourselves.

I would like to see this poll redone, and fairly this time.

Companies use a simple script to manipulate the results. See the blog posted earlier. If these results will be used, then I'll have no confidence in insideRIA whatsoever.

Just added 500 votes for random service just to show how easy you can manipulate the results.

/Jordan

I can't even believe this shit. I hope people at MAX sees thru this. Who votes for these crappy services?

Please see http://www.insideria.com/2009/09/polling-issues-and-irregularit-1.html