A LITTLE RAIN MUST FALL
You knew it was only a matter of time. But like everything in Facebook, it seems to have happened sooner than later.
I'm talking about the increasingly creative ways being figured out by marketers, to use Facebook's many features for spamming purposes.
I just finished deleting a spammy post to the "Wall" on my Facebook page. This is a virtual "wall" that people can write things that may be relevant to me or my community of friends. The post I deleted had links to sites hawking customized T-shirts.
Similarly, over the past few days, I'm getting an increasing number of "notifications", 'invitations", and 'friend requests', by all types of vendors and marketers, hoping to use me as a stepping stone to greater virality within Facebook.
And those are just the direct ones. There are many more indirect ones, being virally re-sent by many of my Facebook friends, who in most cases aren't giving too much thought to the spammy aspect of what they're doing.
They're well-meaning in most cases, much like the friend that sends you "funny jokes" to your office email. What I call "social spam", for lack of a better term. Spam, you trust at first glance before taking a second, closer look.
Judging from the last few days, I'm already spending over 10% of time on Facebook every morning weeding out both direct and indirect bits of spam from my Facebook page. And I suppose it'll get worse before it gets better.
Facebook is trying to deal with this.
I talked a few days ago about how Facebook had pro actively limited the number of people a user could invite to a new application, to 10 a day.
This resulted in significantly less "application invitation" spam for users, but also lowered the appeal of the nascent Facebook platform for developers. They'd come to expect viral distribution, along with a platform, a combination not offered by other platforms before it.
Like I said at the outset, that the spam-fest is happening on Facebook is not a surprise. It's happened on every successful online and/or internet platform, starting with AOL a decade ago, and Skype a few years ago.
In fact, spam on Facebook is not new, as this article from The Heights back in 2005 indicates. What's new though is that because Facebook is supposed to be a network of people you know and trust, the spam that comes through, often with the unwitting help of your friends, comes with a patina of trust "borrowed" from your social network.
So it's been going on for a while on Facebook, but has the potential of increasing far faster after Facebook opened up it's network as part of it's platform strategy almost two months ago. There are already almost 11,000 entries for the term "Facebook spam" on Google.
Facebook, and other social networking platform aspirants, are going to be the next, enticing frontier for spammers of all stripes. We're all going to have to get used to a little more "social spam" rain on our "social graph" parades.
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