He set up a personal account and checked out company profiles, including those of his competitors.
One of his key take-aways: The most popular company profiles were those that engaged visitors with contests, surveys and special offers.
Griffith proved what many had suspected for some time: that edits on company profiles were often originating from IP addresses owned by those companies and even their competitors.
After early incidents of vandalism, Airbnb established a limited guarantee (although not an actual insurance policy) for hosts, and the company emphasizes that its detailed profiles and authentic reviews (after confirmed stays) help protect guests.
The company also added more detailed student profiles, and online quizzes that teachers can administer to students at home or at school.
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But they woke up in January when the company announced that it had created profiles of 100, 000 individual surfers and was planning to sell them to advertisers.
And in the center is LinkedIn's richest and fastest-growing opportunity: turning the company's 161 million member profiles into the 21st-century version of a "little black book" that no corporate recruiter can live without.
The company has built millions of consumer profiles.
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Key corporate news these days can be gleaned from publicly available information such as updates to executives' LinkedIn profiles describing new roles and company job postings looking for new skills or for staff in new parts of the world.
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The book also profiles numerous businesses, like another Georgia company, the industrial carpet maker, Interface, Inc.
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The business social networking company, which now gets 25 million views of its profiles each day, says 175, 000 new user profiles are created every day.
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The Edinburgh-based company was responding to allegations that it set up fake user profiles to entice prospective customers.
The company did admit that "scammers" bombarding users with fake profiles to elicit email addresses and other personal data were a problem for the industry as a whole, but not "something that is specific to Cupid".
In a statement, Cupid, whose websites include cupid.com, benaughty.com, girlsdateforfree.com and flirt.com, said the company "does not employ members of staff to create fake profiles, impersonate users or use any other dubious practice to encourage customers to take out subscriptions or in order to retain existing customers, nor would the company condone, promote or persuade employees to do so".
The company sends banner ads to random MySpace members as they fill out their personal profiles.
Cupid denied at the time that it was creating user profiles on its websites to entice new customers to sign up or that the company sent communications in order to tempt free members to pay subscriptions.
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