A question about MSN contacts/deleting?

MSN, My MSN question

• The following URL is appended to the front of the url that I have defined for all of the "my favorite Links on the MSN My Home page. Does any one have a clue as to why? http://g.msn.com/0US!s9.31612_317621/MY.2023?

• Answer:

  Hi, and Yes I do. See that "?" at the end of the string there? That is the beginning of a GET string, used for sending data using HTML, to a CGI or ASP script/program. In this case, what it is sending is the link you are clicking on. Hypertext Markup Language http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_7.html#SEC7.5 Typically this is done with saved links so the owners can have more details reports on what their site is being used for, and how often. I use this same system on sites I run. If many people who use my site, have in their favorite list, lets say... cnn.com, and 70% of them are using that link on a regular basis, and they are gone from my site for an extended period of time, then one could infer that others who use cnn.com might be interested in my website, so I would look into advertising on that site, or trying to attract the visitors of cnn.com to my site, in some other manner. But, if many people have the link there, but rarely use it, then I'm probably wasting my time attracting cnn.com visitors. There are of course many other ways to use the same data. For instance, if many people using my website, have favorite links to a gardening website, whether it is the same one or not, and use them often, perhaps I should look into providing gardening information on my website, or adding a forum so that visitors can talk to each other about gardening. The list is quite long on what this information might be used for. To be quite honest, most of the time it is not used at all, (not saying MSN isn?t using it), because it takes a great deal of resources to wisely assess traffic patterns on a website, for any profitable action. Once the CGI or ASP program gets your GET string, it reads the link you are trying to go to, ticks something in a database, and then forwards your browser to the page you originally wanted, when you clicked the link. So, in normal circumstances, this delay is minute. thanks, webadept-ga