Secret Crush: The Spam Who Loved Me
Posted on January 21st, 2008Spam has always been a problem with social networks, but now even FaceBook is slowly devolving into a social spamwork site, as the young company looks for new ways to generate revenues. It’s bad enough the service constantly beckons me to spam all of my friends with every new app I add to my profile, or notify them every time my bowels move. Now they’ve introduced new ploys to integrate ads into their service, turning user notification space into ads.
What’s surprises me is how the company makes a deliberate effort to pass off ad code as user notifications in a blatant effort to fool users into clicking. Aside from sheer annoyance, these pseudo notifications show a lack of business ethics on the part of FaceBook. It’s one thing to motivate users to clicking on ad links, but another thing to trick them into doing it, and it’s a growing trend.
The most annoying and prevalent among these ad links are the ones claiming that one or more persons in my friends list has a “secret crush” on me. The ad itself looks exactly like a legitimate FaceBook user notification message, until you click “Continue”, which would normally take you to your profile page but instead redirects you to some questionable site called MyLuvCrush; An obvious spam site designed to harvest emails and personal user information for marketing purposes. Sorry, but my secret crush will have to remain secret… along with my personal information.
I spot these ads all the time now, and they have become so common that I literally can’t log into my profile without being subjected to constant threats from this spam bot warning me that my last chance at happiness is slipping away, and if I don’t find out who my secret crush is now, their message will be deleted and I will spend the rest of my life alone and unloved. That’s simply not true, I have the adult entertainment industry and my blow up sex doll to keep me company.
In no way do I begrudge FaceBook from profiting through use of ads, but there is a right and wrong way of doing that and these masqueraded ads are clearly an improper method for generating revenues.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 7:59 am and is filed under Humor, Social Networks, Spam, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Home
About me
Send me a message
Subscribe
Facebook Profile
FriendFeed 
Pownce profile
Flickr gallery
Twitter profile
AIM/iChat
Messenger
Amazon Wishlist
Smashing Magazine
Design Shack
Screenfluent
Web creme
CSS Remix
CSS drive
CSS Import
CSS Based
CSS Mania
CSS Impress
Most Inspired
Link creme
That’s weird. I’ve NEVER seen any of the ‘tricky’ ads you’re referring to!!! Ah well… maybe spam DOES have a crush on you!
Onyeka
January 22nd, 2008
Seriously? That surprises me because I see them all the time. Count yourself lucky.
Kent
January 22nd, 2008
I agree with you. The FaceBook ads are getting ridiculous and their privacy and intellectual property safeguards are pretty alarming. Any photographs or writing you put on FaceBook becomes their intellectual property and therefore I don’t put anything on FaceBook if it’s my own work that I want to retain righs to. I don’t really know why they feel the need to lay claim to their user’s uploads but better safe than sorry. I don’t install applications anymore because I don’t like getting spammed with application request myself.
If FaceBook feels it’s okay to blatantly disrespect our privacy and spam the users with ads I wouldn’t be surprised if users started leaving in droves. I’ve set my FaceBook privacy setting to not be indexed in the hope that perhaps a Google search of my name no longer has my FaceBook page as the top result but that will take a while to remedy.
Ingrid
February 4th, 2008
Whats even more surprising is to see GOOGLE serving these ads on Facebook. Im surprside because they preach that Relevance is the most important thing for their users and how do they allow it?!
John
February 28th, 2008
I have been spammed the last two days with these text messages on my phone. I contacted Sprint and they have put a block on. They said to report to FCC…get them to STOP! And the calls came between 1am and 6 am!! And I had to leave my phone on because of family illness.
Kathy
March 11th, 2008