Friend Spam: The New Enemy
As my Friendwheel clearly shows, I am far from a Facebook addict. I’ve never initiated friending anyone and I generally only use it to try out new applications that look interesting. While I see it as a natural evolution following the shortcomings of MySpace, I still see Facebook having a limited lifespan and I really don’t want to dump too much time into another temporary community.
Facebook’s greatest feature is probably how it allows you to easily guard yourself against the spammers and lurkers that have contributed to the first ever declines in visitors on MySpace. It’s a clean interface and, unlike MySpace, you never have to see a line of code to embed external content or make sweeping format changes.
However, Facebook applications have now exposed a new Achilles Heel in social networking and that is “friend spam.” Although I’m sure this varies for everyone, I am only tangentially involved with Facebook and I get three friend spam messages in the inbox for every legitimate direct message or friend request. As TechCrunch reports, Facebook is acutely aware that people are getting annoyed at all the pings they’re getting to participate in a game or nominate someone for something or kick a ball or the numerous other things that various applications are trying to get networks of people to do. From now on, users will have the option of completely blocking all invitations from a specific application and even a “clear all” button that eliminates all invites at once. Basically, it will work the same way many spam filters work on email.
The real victims here are word-of-mouth marketers. For years people in WOM have been touting the value of trusted interactions between people in social networks over random reach-driven advertising so if the growing perception of those interactions is that they’re spam, or, in other words, unwelcome, then the whole value proposition is contaminated.
WOM marketers obviously don’t want you annoying your friends about the brands you wish to evangelize so how do they enable WOM without creating spam vehicles?
It’s a tough question but if the 100,000 people in the “No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application!” Facebook group are any indication, it’s one that needs to be answered soon.
