This is new. Every time I selected any text on SFGate (which I tend to do out of habit as I’m reading), I noticed the browser sending data somewhere. I fired up Firebug and found out that every text selection was causing Firefox to fire off a POST to tynt.com with a bunch of data: the text I had selected, the page I was on, even xpaths to the location of my selection. What is tynt.com? Their tagline pretty much says it all:
Here’s the crazy part. If you copy the text and paste it somewhere, it actually adds “Read more” to the end of what you’ve copied with the URL of the page. Well isn’t that annoying. Someone should have told them about my Copy as HTML Link Firefox extension.
Neato… while I hate the fact that its issuing a POST transparently, I’d love to see the statistics for a given high traffic site, both what kind of articles are copied from most and where within the articles are people highlighting most often… maybe a good way to target key text within a given page.