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Dirty Competition on Facebook

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 8th, 2007 6:23 PM

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a session with Ro Choy of RockYou. Ro was speaking in front of a room filled with people interested in launching applications on the Facebook platform. During the session, Ro proceeded to explain one of the tactics that he encouraged using to build a larger user base for your application. Ultimately, the strategy was notification spam. Once a user installs the application, you run a script that runs over the course of a number of days to systematically send notifications to all of their friends.

Apparently, there is a seven to ten day window where you can leverage this strategy. After a certain point though, your application will be marked as spam and you can no longer use these aggressive tactics. The lesson? If an opportunity exists on Facebook that allows you to get a much larger base of users, exploit it no matter how annoying it may be. Is this playing dirty? I think so but that’s up for you to decide. The bottom line is that if the competition is doing it, you are going to be forced to do the same thing.

The alternative is to go purchase traffic from those that are playing dirty. Will you (or would you) use this tactic when you launch your own application?

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 5 Comments

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    On a visceral level these sorts of spam-tactics bother be, but let's face it: if the users are installing it that means they want it.

    Facebook sets the rules and you can't cry foul when someone pushes them to their limits. If Facebook thinks these tactics damage the platform's reputation in the long run then ultimately it is their responsibility to put in measures which prevent it.
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    Put another way, it's obvious Slide and RockYou are playing for keeps. If you want to win that means you either need to beat them at their own game or get the referee to change the rules.
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    Shameless and weak!
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    Maybe thats why all the rockyou applications that i installed spammed my friends and faked a bunch of sh*$. So far they are the only people that i have seen do that... that makes for quite the pathetic existence.

    i would never use that if i launched an app.
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    Nick-

    To put some context for your readers:

    1) We volunteered to lead a 2.5 hour workshop for new Facebook developers looking to grow both organically (i.e. viral) and on a paid basis. Over that period I walked through a presentation which offered a lot of advice focused on how to tune their applications by providing clean flows, focusing on new users and leveraging invite processes to their benefit. All of that presentation material I assume will be openly offered by www.graphingsocial.com or can be accessed by emailing me directly at ro@rockyou.com. Note that there was no mention or reference to 'spamming' users in any part of that presentation. In fact, I made an explicit point of pointing out how improving user engagement can increase virality of an app.

    2) A the end of the workshop, I offered the opportunity for developers to present their applications live to the audience and have me walk them through how to improve the viral engagement and growth of their app. The point here was to help these individual developers, with nothing in return for RockYou. One of the apps presented had a significant issue in generating awareness. I informed that developer of a notification process to help generate awareness that is an openly offered capability of the Facebook platform, openly documented by Facebook, and used by almost every major application developer who reads through the Facebook API documentation. I also made a direct reference that this notification format can often result as being marked by 'spam' by users, and result in the application being blocked from further external notifications as a result. Hence that notification process is short lived in its utility (5-7 days). Honestly, I'd be remiss in talking about organic strategies on Facebook without mentioning it.

    3) Most importantly, RockYou has never used this notification process to our advantage, whereas several of our competitors used this exclusively to grow at our significant expense from a competitive perspective. Facebook's own filtering system quickly blocked overuse of this notification process by our competitors, which convinced us this was not a path to pursue for ourselves.

    RockYou's perspective, as leader in this space, is to be as open and transparent as possible about how we've been successful in order to generate success for as many others across the Facebook platform. The more successful developers there are, the more pageviews and users on Facebook, the more interest from advertisers as a whole in this community, which ultimately helps RockYou and everyone involved on Facebook. Feel free to email or call me with any questions.

    Ro

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