Facebook Spam: You’ve Got to Be Kidding, Right?
Feb 21, 2008 Blogging, Geeky, Social Networking, Tips
I have a new friend — or do I? After I logged into Facebook, I was presented with a rather nice looking female who found me and wants to be friends. Oh, joy!
“O RLY?”
“Jennifer Weissman”, as she’s named, is located in Florida, works for Countrywide Home Loans (with a corresponding affiliate hyperlink), and joined on December 11th. Let’s not forget, she’s single and is seeking a date or a long-term relationship, too.
“Fail.”
I’ve written a lot about social media frustrations and you will see that spam is my biggest pet peeve. This is mainly because I have doubts that the big three (MySpace, Facebook, AOL) do enough to aggressively go after spammers and preserve the integrity of their social networks.Of course, I really can’t complain unless I report the offender. Here’s how to report spam profiles on Facebook:
“Pwnt.”
Have you observed more frequent unknown/unsolicited friend requests on Facebook?
Share your experiences in the comments below!
Tags: Abuse, facebook, social media, Social Networking, spam
February 26th, 2008 at 12:46 AM
She was fat anyway.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:30 AM
JW,
Though I don’t disagree with your conclusion, I think spammers are trying to make their junk profiles seem more approachable to the male 18 - 30 demographic.
On an unrelated note, I did switch to a new spam filter on here, you might enjoy it and not get blocked. It beats Akismet.
~Joe
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:31 AM
Ahhh, so now that you no longer work for a liberal media company the Junkman’s posts are no longer blocked
March 2nd, 2008 at 4:30 AM
JW,
LOL, you know I’ve been called a flaming liberal, a cold neo-nazi, Marxist Communist among other things… so I am again going to rest with, “I hate everyone equally”
Anyhow, the new spam filter is working out pretty well. Their algorithm catches more spam and lets more ham get posted. We’ll see how it behaves over the next week when I roll down to AZ this week.
~J
March 17th, 2008 at 11:57 AM
Um yeah. AOL isn’t in the top three social networks. It’s Myspace, Orkut, and Facebook.
It’s not even listed on this list of social networking sites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
March 19th, 2008 at 1:00 AM
Happi Slappi,
Thanks for commenting. While I do respect your desire to reference Wikipedia, understand that the AOL Buddy List *was* the first social network of its kind. It was the first network that people used to engage and add friends with each other, and further — communicate and grow those relationships.
I am pretty confident in saying that AOL is around the top three (or four) networks, because of their AIM users. If I remember, 65M users supersedes Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s IM network.
Also, if you recall *wayyy* back in the day, circa AOL 4.0, AOL had a very easy to use online profile product and became very popular during the adolescent years of AOL. Recently, MySpace merely created their product from AOL’s (and I don’t blame them, either).
Now, getting back to the point of this entry, ALL social networks need to be aware of the Spam that exists on them and they should educate users to assist in reporting it properly, like I demonstrated for the Facebook Spam.
Thanks again for the comment!
~Joe