There have been a number of people that I have spoken with that tell me their stories of getting temporarily banned from Facebook. One person, a recruiter, was reaching out to Facebook users as a recruiting method. While there are effective ways for doing this, his method of contacting a number of people individually was not as effective. After reaching out to an unknown number of users, he was temporarily banned and received a warning. Then yesterday, I spoke with a Facebook application developer. He was telling me about how he was temporarily banned for promoting his application in the developer forums. The lesson? Facebook is heavily invested in monitoring community activity. Anything closely resembling spam-like activity is automatically flagged and sent through a review process. In my own opinion this is a smart move by Facebook.
I used to receive a countless number of spam messages on my MySpace profile. Since I rarely login to MySpace, the profiles were deleted by the time I viewed the message, but the message was still in my inbox. Facebook’s strict monitoring of community activity ensures integrity within the Facebook environment. Ultimately you should not be receiving spam. Additionally, Facebook is extremely strict with monitoring news feed activitiy. Only 0.2% of news feed articles are approved for display. That is a measly 2 out of 1000. Pretty darn impressive! Anyone looking to game the system is going to have an extremely hard time. While spammers and pranksters have been successful at creating Google bombs (a linking strategy that puts random sites to the top of specific Google searches), they are going to find it extremely challenging to game the Facebook system. As internet users are exposed to an increasing amount of spam on a daily basis, they will be driven to signup for Facebook as they search for a safe haven from spam. Who do you think will win the battle in the end? Spammers or Facebook?
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It will be interesting to see how well their monitoring and review process scales as the population swells up towards Myspace numbers and the site becomes a more attractive target for spammers. They are lucky in that they have one very visible model of how not to solve the problem. The Myspace strategy of burying their heads in the sand most certainly led to thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of people abandoning the site.I don't expect FB to be perfect in this department as the tools available are still maturing, but if I get one message in my inbox containing the string "profile tracker" or "free ring tones", I'm heading for the hills.
Comment by Larry Rubin — July 17, 2007 @ 8:11 am
It will be interesting to see how well their monitoring and review process scales as the population swells up towards Myspace numbers and the site becomes a more attractive target for spammers.
They are lucky in that they have one very visible model of how not to solve the problem. The Myspace strategy of burying their heads in the sand most certainly led to thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of people abandoning the site.
I don’t expect FB to be perfect in this department as the tools available are still maturing, but if I get one message in my inbox containing the string “profile tracker” or “free ring tones”, I’m heading for the hills.
Comment by Larry Rubin — July 17, 2007 @ 1:11 pm