Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Spamming on Facebook

I thought I'd do my good deed for the day and post on the 'Arsenal Football Club' group on Facebook about the Twitter app/user I created to update according to the latest scores and final result.

I started a discussion, trying to share the app, explaining about Twitter and how everyone could benefit from free SMS updates. That was my good deed.

The first response was telling me that I shouldn't be spamming. I was somewhat shocked at this and of course, sent a Tweat. I thought I was sharing not spamming, and a little later the discussion was deleted.

I looked at the definition of Forum Spam on Wikipedia, certainly I may be guilty of trying to raise awareness of something away from the group/discussion, but I'm certainly no spambot and I thought I'd be doing some people a favour to highlight a really useful free product.

It made me think about Facebook, advertising and spamming in general. There's 20 odd thousand members on this Arsenal group and I presume most of them don't mind that Facebook puts ads on every page, or that their friends send them loads of crappy vampire bites, but they mind if a stranger posts something.

I just find it disappointing. When someone offers something for free and they are paying out of their own pocket (hosting isn't free people) that they get tainted with the word 'spam' when they feel like sharing something they think people may find useful.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

lol, tried the same on my fav spurs forum glory-glory.com, post got removed, got told it was spam, i just laughed, its free, 100% free!

Robbie said...

glory-glory.com, spurs website? lol.

Seriously though, totally agree, bet they'd take payment if you wanted to advertise on there but you can't give something away for free.

Anonymous said...

oh, update.. managed to convince them that it wasnt spam.. so hopefully see some sign ups.

Robbie said...

Nice one, I have seen two people follow the twitter.com/spurs_scores, one followed only spurs_scores and the other followed one other. Interesting to see if more people start using these tools just for sources of information rather then the social networking side.

Anonymous said...

spamming is surely a threat to cyber space. most of the spammers are also hackers and they break into your pc as soon as you click on their email links. in order to fight the spam threat we need a strong spam filters for our emails which secures us from most of the spam mails. i have heard that http://www.zapak.com is one of the good e-mail service provider who gives maximum protection from most of the spam mails, now that is what we internet lovers require.