Third Voice, A New Phantom Menace?

There is a new piece of Windows only software called Third Voice. It is a browser plugin for MSIE 4.0.x which allows it's users to post messages to any website, secure or not. I titled this message "phantom menace" because there is no Mac version. Webmasters won't be able to tell their sites have been vandalized because the software makes no modification to the site itself.

It works with the browser. It makes an "overlay" of whatever site you are looking at. Users can highlight any text or graphic, and post a comment. A small orange triangle appears to the user on the page, which then can be read by clicking on it. It destroys text formatting in some cases. Some sites like yahoo, disney, white house, altavista, hotmail and others have so many triangles on them already, it's ridiculous. Some of the posts are nothing more than grafitti. Others are helpful comments, others are spam with links to other sites, even some porno sites. Make no mistake. This is the biggest threat to our craft we have ever faced.

We webmasters need to band together to either see this software banned, or force it's manufacturer to provide us with a way to block it's use on the sites we design. Our customers pay for their domain name, pay us to make a visually appealing informative site, and don't need some cyberpunk posting things like "this site sucks" or "kilroy was here" on websites we build and care for. Please put something regarding this on your page, along with a link to a group which has formed against this software. The link is here.

I am also sending this to other Mac news websites which I visit daily. Again, thanks for all your work and dedication."