Category: Social Networking
It was only a matter of time. Give spammers an easy way to reach millions, and they’ll do it.
It is already pretty easy for a motivated spammer to commit Like Fraud: the act of creating a Facebook Like button for a URL other than the one on which users click.
In a similar manner, spammers have created sites that carry little else other than Google ads and funny phrases that users can “like” and share on their Facebook profiles. These sites are known as Like Farms. Many aren’t necessarily substituting a different URL, but theoretically, they could. This would give the target URL a lot of attention.
Seem like harmless fun? Sorry, it’s not. Here are some of the potential consequences of “liking” random messages from spammers:
- Google (GOOG) has already flagged at least one as potentially carrying malware that may harm your computer. Be careful of clicking on the URLs of these funny messages. They may lead you to harmful sites.
- You may be inundated with Facebook spam. By “liking” a spammer’s message, you are giving that spammer permission to start sending you Facebook updates. Lots and lots of them.
- Although this doesn’t hurt you directly, these “likes” may make the spammer’s site seem more important to Google. Therefore, the next time you do a Google search, you may see that spammer’s site listed higher than a legitimate one with real information. I’m sure Google will correct this someday though.
- Similar to gaming Google’s search results, this can game Facebook’s search results too.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that Like Farms have sprouted; it was only a matter of time. Now that they’ve blossomed, be careful where you tread and what you Like, for not all Likes are created equal.
Now for some Friday fun.
This just in: Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings, reports The Onion.
“Look, he’s clicking ‘Friends Only’ for his e-mail address. Like that’s going to make a difference!” howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers.
Oh, the humanity.
It’s being referred to enough by the media that I think it will become a commonly-known adage. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Law, I mean. And I don’t mean the “Once every hundred years media changes” statement he made. The other one:
I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.
Not only have I been hearing & seeing it in the press, but even industry movers, shakers, and funders are mentioning it. Most recently, Yuri Milner, the CEO and founder of the Russian Internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, referred to it during his interview at the 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference. DST is also an investor of Facebook.
Zuckerberg’s Law hasn’t been proven yet, so it’s tough to compare it against a golden standard like Moore’s Law. But it certainly feels intuitively true. Will it become a golden standard too? Only time will tell.
When venture capitalist John Doerr has a theory, people sit up and listen. Over at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 conference (happening today), he’s presenting what he calls the Third Wave. As reported by TechCrunch yesterday:
The First Wave was personal computers and the wave of disruption that caused. The second wave was the Internet, ditto. We are now, says Doerr, in the Third Wave.
What exactly is the Third Wave? It’s the tectonic shifts we’re seeing in mobile platforms (read his post here about the iPad), the social graph (particularly Facebook), and online commerce. All of these things are related and being accelerated by each other (Facebook is the largest mobile application, Zynga leverages Facebook and also stokes Facebook growth, Groupon is social/flash commerce, etc.).
John Doerr’s Waves of Disruptive Technologies
To summarize, it sounds to me like Doerr is saying:
- The First Wave is personal computing
- The Second Wave is the internet
- The Third Wave is social media & mobile devices
Common Traits of Disruptive Technologies
When I look at these waves, I see several common traits. Each subsequent wave builds upon one another. Also, each wave:
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Increases the level of communication the previous technology affords. These advances, to some extent, mirror real-world interactivity, and extend beyond it. For instance, real-world interactivity only happens at a specific time, a specific location, and by the specific people who are present. Online interactivity can do this, and be at any time, at any place, and by multiple people in real-time or delayed-time. Additional information about the other person can also be shared, such as location, work history, and favorite restaurants, providing a context that real-world interactivity may not.
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Decreases the distance & friction between two or more parties, consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-business, and business-to-business. Each of those entities can be plural as well. This means the velocity of communication has gone from weeks to minutes to immediate. This also means traditional layers of hierarchy have broken down. A grade school student can contact a CEO or the President of the United States, for example. Or a fast food franchise can send a coupon to your phone if you walk by one of their restaurants.
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Increases the utility of the previous technology for the user. The personal computer allows a person to write reports, spreadsheets, and presentations. The internet allows a person to conduct research on any topic in the world. Social media allows a person to communicate with friends, family, customers, and more. Mobile devices allow a person to conduct any of these operations wherever that person is located. It is becoming easier, faster, and in some ways, more effective & efficient, to accomplish all the tasks you need to accomplish.
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Increases the level of intimacy of the technology, while conversely decreasing the level of privacy. A personal computer enables a person to publish print newsletters and reach a limited, yet known audience. The internet enables a person to publish websites and reach a vast, yet unknown audience. Social media enables people to publish thoughts, opinions, and self-expressions, and reach a vast, yet selective audience. Mobile devices enable people to publish anywhere, not just at their laptops, but on a train, plane, or even the toilet. The Third Wave allows you to share your intimate thoughts during potentially intimate moments, though the services are still struggling with the appropriate levels of privacy.
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Increases the relevancy & clarity of the message. As the intimacy level increases with each wave, the sender is able to know more and more about the receiver. This enables the sender to customize and personalize each message, making it more relevant and useful to the receiver. A skilled sender will also know how to use the latest technologies to send a clear message that can prompt action and be measurable. There is still value to broadcasting a common message to the masses, though sending customized messages to targeted individuals will yield a higher conversion rate & return on investment.
Predicting the Fourth Wave
When placed in this light, I think it’s possible to draw tentative conclusions on what the Fourth Wave may look like. Some trends that I foresee are:
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Predictive computing. Communications have sped up to real-time now. How much faster can you get than that? How about happening before it even happens? There are indications that predictive computing may already be here, so perhaps this will be just another trait of the Third Wave. Facebook already has a data science team that may know who you may hook up with. Ferreals.
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Life action streams. Foursquare allows you to publish where you are when you are there, though it’s just a single message and not an exact note of when you arrive and when you leave. Miso allows you to publish what you are watching when you watch it, though it doesn’t let anyone know if you are tuning into the commercials or channel-surfing. The Fourth Wave may offer a continuous stream of all your actions. It’s a bit scary, but I could see its usefulness in ethnographic studies, television ratings, and perhaps tracking your children when they are at Disneyland with you, in case they get lost (mobile phones with GPS can already do this though).
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Bio-sharing. Devices could be implanted into us to provide someone with immediate information about our bodies. To some extent, this is already being being done in the medical community, like the pacemakers that transmit a heart’s condition in real-time. But how about a device that monitors how well the body is holding up to chemotherapy? Or how happy or angry you are at a game? Could be a good predictor of riots. I suppose some enterprising individual could foresee social media uses too, like sharing when you’re hungry and when you’re sleeping.
What do you think may be in the Fourth Wave?
Photo via: cliff1066™
Whatever you do, don’t Like this post.
Seriously, don’t. Otherwise, you’ll end up Liking a very different site other than this one.
This is an example of possible Like fraud. If you know HTML, this is surprisingly easy to do. Just grab the code from Facebook and modify the “href” parameter, like this:
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.url.com&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:px"></iframe>
That means you can take this part of the code (in bold):
href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.url.com
and swap in whatever URL you’d like. The poor unsuspecting user who clicks on that Like button is now a fan of whatever URL you placed in there, like NaughtyNurses.com.
Furthermore, you can include some metadata to change the text of what appears in the activity stream of the PUU. Facebook gives developers two ways to do this: one with their XFBML tag & JavaScript SDK, and one using meta tags (shown below):
<meta property="og:title" content="Title of Content"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Name of Site"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.url.com/img.jpg"/>
Though I haven’t tested it enough to confirm this, I believe the image you can associate with the Like button (which must be 50×50 px in size) can appear in the PUU’s list of Fan Pages.
Pretty easy, huh?
I have a bad feeling Facebook’s Like buttons will be abused like this. It’s just too easy to do. Since their code is embedded within the sandboxed environment of an iframe, it won’t be easy to protect users from Like Fraud either. But hopefully the developers at Facebook are aware & looking into this.
P.S. I originally embedded a rather risque URL in that test Like button. But I’ve replaced it with a URL to my web development agency, WebMocha, so I don’t get anyone in trouble and have something like, “John likes Naughty Nurses” appear in their activity stream, hilarious as that would be.
So if you want to test this hack out, feel free to safely click on the Like button. What you’ll see on your Facebook wall is something like “John likes WebMocha: Web Development Done Right.” I promise we won’t do anything malicious with your endorsement of our agency. Or will we? Muhaha. Just kidding!
Constraints can conduce creativity. That’s part of the fun of crafting a 140-character message, in my opinion. It’s like a haiku. Within its limitations can come great beauty.
I’m not saying my tweets are beautiful. Far from it. But since I’ve begun tweeting, I’ve thought carefully about each message. And more than that, I’ve also tried to follow this rule:
Make every tweet useful.
To me, this means more than describing what I had for lunch or how I had a bad day. Something beyond pointless babble, basically. Something hopefully useful, meaningful, and can provide someone with value. Perhaps an insightful quote (I have a thing for great quotes). Perhaps an interesting link. Or perhaps a business idea.
It is relatively easy to craft a useful standalone tweet. A reply within a conversation is tougher. Since it can be difficult to discern conversational context from a single tweet, sometimes Twitter feels like a mess of private conversations. The current remedy is to manually hunt around to determine what was written before and after a particular tweet in a conversation. Some tools try to alleviate this, but I haven’t found one that does an effective job yet. (If you know of one, please let me know.)
Without that conversational context, I’ve purported to make replies useful as well. To me, this means trying to avoid empty responses like, “Thanks!”, “LOL”, or “:)”, and trying to provide some kind of context if I reply to someone. This isn’t always possible. When it’s not, I try to craft my reply so if readers click on the “in reply to…” link, they’ll be able to catch up quickly.
It’s already tough to squeeze a useful message in 140 characters. Doing all of this on top of that is even more difficult. But I like to think that these constraints encourage me to think creatively. And hopefully, all of this makes my tweets more useful to my followers.
P.S. I should mention another constraint. I try to keep my tweets at 126 characters, not 140. This gives room for a potential retweet. If someone were to retweet me, they would likely add a: “RT @mikeleeorg”. That’s 14 characters. Subtract that from 140, and the space I have left is 126 characters.
Ah, the fun of constraints!
Know what is totally awesome? The game Civilization IV.
There’s this feature in Civ4, called the Foreign Advisor, that displays a map of all the known civilizations. Between each civilization is a color-coded line to show the relationship between each civilization. White means they’re neutral, red means they’re at war, etc.
Looking at that screen, I thought it would be interesting to map out how some of the more prominent technology companies would compare. Here is what I came up with:
Color key:
- Red – In direct & aggressive competition
- Green – In some form of alliance
- Gray – Neutral with each other
It’s interesting to see how many red lines come out of Google (GOOG). Looks like they’ve put themselves against just about everyone. The only one they don’t seem to be overtly competing against, and may be collaborating with, is Twitter.
AOL (AOL) also has quite a few red lines, though I doubt anyone considers them much of a competitive threat anymore. With their rumored Bebo sale, the lines between them and Facebook & MySpace (NWS) will probably turn gray.
Twitter, as far as I can tell, only seems to have one competitor in this diagram: Facebook. Both Google and bing (MSFT) / Yahoo! (YHOO) are indexing tweets in their search engines, so I assume their relationships are friendly. I wasn’t sure how competitive their relationship with MySpace is, so I assumed it was just neutral.
What do you think of this diagram? How would you color these lines & relationships?
