Hotbar

» see hotbar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

If you studied computer engineering you spent a decade being handed other people's machines. The complaint was always that it had gotten slow, and the cause was usually four toolbars stacked on top of each other above a browser window that had maybe two inches of web left in it. Hotbar was one of the names in that stack. Nobody ever admitted to installing it, and in the technical sense nobody had.

Oren Dobronsky and Gaby Carni started it in 1999. The product was a plugin for Internet Explorer and for Outlook Express. It put a skin on the browser frame and a toolbar across the top carrying a search box and shopping links, and it shipped a library of emoticons and animated e-cards you could drop into an email. That last part was the hook. The rest of it reported where the browser went, and the advertising sold against that reporting was the revenue.

It spread by riding along. Hotbar was bundled into freeware installers, and the permission to install it lived in an end user license agreement that nobody read and that was not written to be read. By 2002 the company reported three million active users and had reached operating break-even, which for a 1999-vintage internet company was respectable timing.

Security vendors classified it as adware. Benjamin Edelman documented Hotbar advertising being promoted on sites aimed at children without meaningful disclosure. The company disputed the label hard enough to litigate over it, lost that argument in 2006, and sold itself the same year into 180solutions for a figure reported around $50 million. What it had sold itself into turned out to be the last three years of the American adware business.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ emoticons were the payload ~

The genuinely clever part was the choice of decoy. Toolbars are a hard sell because nobody wants one, but a teenager in 2001 writing email in Outlook Express very much wanted a smiling face with a party hat on it, and Hotbar shipped hundreds of them. Smiley Central worked the same territory on the same economics. The bargain was real in a narrow sense: something small and free was offered, with advertising software welded to the back of it.

The cost only showed up later and never as one obvious thing. A browser that opened slower every month, and a search box that was no longer the one you had picked. Removal was reported as difficult often enough that the difficulty became part of why the security vendors classified it the way they did.

~ suing the antivirus companies ~

Through 2005 and 2006 Hotbar sent cease-and-desist letters to security companies that flagged its software, arguing that the malware and spyware labels were defamatory. Symantec took the unusual step of going to court to have the question settled in advance, asking for a declaration that it was entitled to classify Hotbar's product as low risk adware. The case resolved in early 2006 with Symantec keeping exactly that right.

That mattered commercially more than it mattered legally. The adware model depended on distribution deals with software publishers, and no publisher wanted a bundle partner that every antivirus product on the market flagged on install. Winning the classification fight was not optional for the business, and Hotbar could not win it.

~ what was left after zango ~

180solutions had renamed itself Zango by the time the merger completed. Zango settled with the FTC on 3 November 2006, handed over $3 million, and accepted a twenty year order against installing software without consent. The Tel Aviv office closed in December 2008. On 20 April 2009 a consortium of banks foreclosed on $44 million of debt and Zango was finished, with Blinkx buying the assets out of the wreck.

Hotbar outlived its parent by a little over a year. The leftovers were folded into something called Pinball Corporation, and from version 10.2 onward the software identified itself as belonging to Pinball rather than to anyone you had heard of. Distribution closed in August 2010, though the thing kept running for anyone who still had it. That is the correct ending for this product: not a shutdown notice, just a slow stop in the supply of new installations, on machines whose owners had never wanted it in the first place.

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