Friend shopping not allowed: Facebook

Mon Nov 23 15:17:16 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to "USocial" claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm. ***

Friends and Followers should not be bought, is the message from Facebook. Connect only to those who want to connect to you and we will stop those companies who sell online friends. USocial is a web-marketing firm, operating form Australia, providing Facebook, Twitter and FrontPage marketing services. Their Facebook marketing service states "For an investment of only $197, we'll bring you 1,000 brand new targeted Facebook friends to your existing account, or we'll set up a new account for yourself or your business at no charge in order to deliver the targeted friends." USocial has package of buying 1000 to 100000 Twitter followers at varying price range. If such kinds of activities are allowed to run under the banner of web advertising then the thin line between web promotion and spamming, disappears.

Social Networking: Blessing in disguise or disguised curse. It certainly can be both, depending upon what it is used for. Once a website appears to be promising, username hoarders attack them piling up hundred of thousands of accounts. This business case sounds strange but not when website becomes successful like Facebook or Twitter. Some people will not mind paying 10---00$ for an effective username. Problem does not end here, tools are available to analyze your social behaviors and sell the data to spam marketers for targeted marketing; Some tools make you follow others and them following you (trade users); others creates auto bots to do what humans were supposed to. These acts are part of "Internet Black Markets" with sole goal of spamming or inexpensive web marketing.

Why to act now!

Such trade based antisocial networking is dangerous for the sustainability of "Social Networking" and should be stopped. Bitter truth, Facebook knew about this activity from years. So, why did not they act earlier? One line answer, they probably enjoyed this bloated, intermingled and tangled user base (**). After all Facebook has recently crossed over 200 million user accounts and have dethroned Myspace as top social networking site.

The Sleeping Twee-ty:

It does not take Pundit's brain to judge that buying and selling of friends is not as per the Facebook terms and conditions. This "terms and conditions" violation phenomenon is not only happening on Facebook; Say it be Myspace, Orkut or Twitter, everyone is deeply impacted, with Twitter suffering the most. Situation is very grave for Twitter as per one of the survey 40% of the tweets are spams, spread for generating web traffic. Twitter has his own share of trouble, which needs to be fixed ASAP.

Equivalent of buying friends on Facebook is buying/trading followers for Twitter. Sales and purchase of successful Twitter account is unique trouble here. More the followers bigger your audience, so if you have made an effective follower base then consider it as an asset. Best Twitter account is the one which tweets the most, so, for that there are Auto Tweet Bots. Queue your input and they will tweet for you day and night. Most useful followers are the ones which are active themselves, get a Auto user follower who will follow newest or recently active users on your behalf, they might follow you in return. Tools are available to handle multiple Tweeter accounts simultaneously, so that you can get even more specific about targeted tweets/spamming.

Facebook has woken up to these threats but we have not heard anything from Twitter yet. Future of twitter lies with resolution of above-mentioned problems and as a user of such social networking sites; I would expect them to act sooner rather than later.

*** Facebook acts on follower trade

** This is an assumption, not a fact.

Posted at 03:17PM Nov 23, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[1]