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A Facebook application that lets you discover and track bands has seen some rapid growth in the past 24 hours and we think we know why. Apparently the application, called pickRset, is sending out notifications to its users’ Facebook friends with an invite to join a “fan page.”
This seems harmless enough, yet clicking on the invite automatically redirects to the “Allow Access” page for the pickRset application, without providing any other details about the app, and certainly not redirecting to a Facebook fan page. According to a tip we received from optionshiftk, clicking the “Allow” button on the app’s “Allow Access” page will in turn send out fan page invites to all their friends as well.
The problem with this type of message is that it’s misleading and uses deceitful trickery to gain viral growth amongst trusted Facebook friends. It’s one thing to willingly send an invite to a friend for an app you enjoy on Facebook. It’s another thing to have messages being sent out unknowingly to friends in a very misleading manner, especially when the notifications section of Facebook is involved.
I checked out the application with a rarely-used Facebook account, and sent an invite to a single friend, asking them to be on the lookout for a fan page invite. They never received the invite, which could indicate that pickRset has stopped sending the deceiving notifications out to users’ friends. I then noticed that the pickRset developers have added a message on the application’s homepage alerting users to the notifications errors that have taken place in the last day or so. The message reads:
“So it appears that notifications are going crazy for the pickRset Facebook application. First out sorry. We are trying to figure this out. We have had the application up and running for a while now and then all of a sudden the notifications kicked in within the last 24 hours.”
I’ve reached out to the pickRset team to better understand what could have suddenly happened with the notifications options for this Facebook app, but I haven’t received a response yet. From the looks of it, the spammy and misleading issue here could have been an honest mistake. What’s unclear is what type of fan page pickRset was referring to in its malicious invites. The application itself has a “fans” section for each artist it features, and this could be the fan page the pickRset invites were meant for. Regardless of the intention, however, using any sort of misleading content in an application invite is never a good idea and makes progress slower and more difficult for trustworthy applications.
Hello Kristen. My name is Chris Siglin I actually own pickRset and would like to addresses your comments and concerns.
First out I once again can not say how sorry I am about this. That being said if I can take this moment to explain I would be more than happy to.
We at pickRset built the actual website over 2 years ago as a meant to help out our friends bands and never once have we spammed any of our users. We find this to be highly offensive. In November of 2008 we hired a 3rd party company to build out pickRset as a facebook application as well as work on building this out for other social networks as well. We were promised by this company that the work would be done in a timely fashion and that everything was on the up and up especially with notifications so that this issue would not happen.As you can tell by your graph that you included we have had the application up and running now for some time with none of these issues happening at all. Over the weekend Saturday evening to be precise there was a sudden growth that we could not figure out. Then we got a couple complaints and started to see what was happening. All of a sudden the notifications were being sent out. We never changed the code and honestly I have no idea why this is even started happening out of the blue.This is why we turned off any notifications until we could get to the bottom of what was going on.
I am not sure who you tried to contact with pickRset but I can say that never once did I personally receive a message via email and or Facebook. I also made sure that anyone that did report a problem I personally contacted them to explain the situation. Unfortunately the people that did leave comments through Facebook about this problem are anonymous which lead us to posting on the site about the problem so that is was atleast addresses.
Trust me when I say we have never attempted to spam and or aggravation to the fans that use our site and applications. We make absolutely no money on this and only do this to help out bands. We have a mailing list from our double opt in user base on our site with over 75,000 people yet we have never even used this one to send out an email to them letting them know info about the site or upgrades. We pride ourselves on not being intrusive in peoples lives.
If you or anyone would like to contact me I encourage you to write me directly at:
chris@pickrset.com
Thank you for your time.
Chris, if what you say is true, then your developers are at fault and should be fired. It is unacceptable for me, as a facebook user, to be plagued with an influx of notifications(about 5, of the same message from my contacts). Secondly, why does the notification claim it will take you to a band fan page, when really you get sent to an app install page? Poorly designed.