Facebook Like Fraud and Like Farms

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.

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Evan Williams, The Man Behind Digital Publishing

What a lucky duck. Evan Williams, I mean. He was at the front of two digital publishing revolutions: blogging and microblogging (and almost at podcasting).

The way he developed his businesses and products is fascinating, for entrepreneurs, product managers, and 21st century writers alike. Here are some highlights that I consider particularly notable. Much of what I’ve gathered is secondary research from various articles, interviews, Wikipedia, and the great book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days.

In 1999, Evan Williams co-founded the company Pyra Labs. Their aim was to create online project management software.

During this time, the term weblog (remember that?) arose as a log (a “web log”) of a person’s activities, much like a journal. Many website owners began publishing weblogs, though it was a relatively cumbersome process that required technical knowledge. A few, like Williams, decided to write a simple script that allowed themselves to publish their thoughts without having to FTP or SSH into their servers and write HTML each time.

Then Williams had a shot of insight. He integrated that simple script into Pyra as an internal feature called Stuff. Later, it was launched as Blogger. Although it wasn’t an overnight success, this simple script eventually grew much faster than the project management software of Pyra.

For you younger readers, it may be hard to believe that blogging once wasn’t commonplace. But there was a time where pundits and journalists wrestled with its value. “Why would anyone blog?” they asked. And more importantly, “Why would anyone read a stranger’s blog?”

For writers, this opened up a whole new field of opportunities. Here was an easy way to publish your stories, your thoughts, and even your photos to the whole wide world. No technical knowledge needed; anyone could do it. The transformation was incredible.

Then, despite raising half a million dollars, Pyra ran out of money in January 2001. All of its employees left. Williams remained to keep Blogger running, striking life-sustaining deals and developing Blogger Pro, until Google (GOOG) purchased them in February 2003.

At the heels of the blogging phenomenon was podcasting, the publishing of audio content. People could now publish their writings or photos on a blog, or words as a podcast. A whole new class of publishers arose as a result.

Seeing the next digital publishing trend, Williams left Google to co-found Odeo in 2005, a podcast publishing and aggregation platform. It was like Blogger, but for audio.

Podcasting didn’t take off as vibrantly as blogging, but it’s still a strong phenomenon. There is definitely a niche of consumers who enjoy creating and listening to podcasts.

During one fateful brainstorming session at Odeo, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an SMS group messaging service. A prototype was built soon thereafter, then publicly released as Twitter on July 2006. Another new publishing platform.

Williams and team spun off Twitter as a separate company in July 2007. As of this post, it appears they’ve raised around $160M. $5M of that came from a series A round, perhaps buoyed by Williams’ track record.

You can imagine the immediate reactions to such a service, however. “Why would anyone tweet?” Pundits and journalists asked. “Why would anyone read a stranger’s tweets?” I wonder if Williams appreciated the irony and enjoyed it as deja vu all over again.

Although many use Twitter as a marketing vehicle (as they do with blogs and podcasts too), countless others see it as a publishing platform. It’s even known officially as microblogging in the industry.

That’s how I primarily use it too. Within its 140-character constraint is the ability to create a whole new class of art. Whether it be haiku, imagery, short stories, or even novels, there’s a lot of creative potential in Twitter as a publishing platform for 21st century writers.

Being a writer has never been more exciting. New technologies keep on revolutionizing the field and enabling new classes of creators and artists. It is easier than ever to publish a story, a thought, a song, a photo, a video, or any piece of art to millions of people around the world.

Sure, there are still questions of quality (how do I know if this artist is worth following?) and discovery (how can my art be seen?), but the tools are there. The means of publishing are there. Anyone can use them.

I sometimes wonder if the next company that revolutionizes the digital publishing world will be another Williams company. I’m not an EV fanboy, but I envy how he’s been at the forefront of two digital publishing revolutions so far. Being someone who loves this field, I gotta say: What a lucky duck.

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Technology, Mobile, Internet Business, Digital Design and Web 2.0 Conferences

Got the itch to travel? And the desire to meet colleagues from other states? And perhaps catch an interesting talk or two? How about an industry conference?

Within the world of web startups and internet businesses, there are a dizzying number of conferences. I’ve attempted to list all of the major ones here. Upcoming dates are included if they’ve been announced. Many of these conferences have already had their 2010 events, so perhaps I’ll have to create this list again early next year to catch the 2011 events before they happen. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know.

Props to: Casey Allen

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Like Fraud: Don’t Like This Post

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!

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Map of Technology Competitors

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?

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How to Rob a House with Google Buzz

PleaseRobMe.com focused on Foursquare. It highlighted random people checking into public locations, implying that they weren’t home and thus, their belongings could be robbed.

However, it’s not a realistic scenario. All you know is that Random_Joe is at some restaurant or cafe. You don’t know where Random_Joe lives. So how can you rob him?

Enter Google Buzz (GOOG). And this is scary.

Every once in a while, I’ll check out nearby buzzes on Google Buzz Mobile. Usually it’s some harmless comment or random conversation. Sometimes it’s a helpful tip or review on a restaurant. On a few occasions however, I’ve seen people buzz from a residential location, presumably their home.

It’s not difficult to guess what you can do from there, especially if they haven’t limited their privacy options on their Google Profile. Yup, you can monitor their buzzes, learn about their habits, and even know where they are (and when they’re not home).

Methinks PleaseRobMe.com should switch their Foursquare feed with Google Buzz.

Fortunately, it looks like only a few people are doing this right now. I imagine using your mobile phone to buzz from home isn’t a common use case, though it clearly happens. Perhaps this should be a new best practice: Don’t do anything online that can share your personal address and your current whereabouts to strangers.

P.S. I also once saw a guy buzz about how much he hated dealing with customers. And he did this from his work location, a car repair shop. Guess which shop I’ll never go to.

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An Unidentified User is Following Me on Google Buzz

This is odd. In my list of followers on Google Buzz (GOOG), there is an unidentified user. How mysterious.

I didn’t know Google’s accounts allowed you to create an account anonymously, much less follow someone anonymously. Aren’t names required?

I’m flattered an unidentified user is following me. It’s not like they can’t follow me on Twitter anonymously already. Perhaps this is part of the new privacy features Google Buzz is rolling out.

Anyone know anything about how this?

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The Twitterverse

Now for some Friday fun.

Here’s a neat visual of most (maybe all?) the apps that, in some way, aid your usage & experience of Twitter. The Twitterverse, as authors Jesse Thomas & Brian Solis call it.

This is just version 0.9. They’re still working on the final version.

It’s a tough job for sure. I tried to visit a bunch of the apps listed in this chart and a few did not seem to exist anymore. And new ones seem to be cropping up every day. Makes me kind of wonder how this chart could look as a living, breathing animation that is constantly updated – and perhaps done in AJAX or Flash.

Now there’s a fun project if you have some time on your hands. You could even extrapolate it into charts for other ecosystems, so to speak. Like Twitter celebrities, or popular blogs, or start-ups within a certain industry, etc.

Great work by Jesse and Brian though! I’m eager to see the final version.

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