Are Spammers Moving to Social Networks?

Alistair Croll on May 15, 2008

MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.

Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006. And Nielsen calls mobile social networking the next big thing, estimating 2.8 million unique mobile MySpace users and 1.8 million mobile Facebook users in December 2007.

According to antispam firm Cloudmark, spammers are already embracing these new technologies: Between 15 percent and 30 percent of friend requests on some of the largest social networks lead to a spammy profile.

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Aroxo: How Little Decisions Matter — A Lot

Matt Rogers on April 4, 2008

Editor’s Note: Matt Rogers, the founder of Aroxo, is a regular contributor to Found|READ, and a very thoughtful guy. I often visit his blog, Digging my own ditch , to see what he’s up to — he let’s us publish — and today I ran across this: How search engine spam created Web 2.0 and drove the social revolution. In it, Matt ponders how small, even sometimes seemingly arbitrary decisions, can have great impacts on your business. He relates this notion to the selection of “two little words” (marketing), all the way through the evolution of Google’s search results presentation method (architecture). It’s worth reading, not just to remind you that small things count, but also this: that probably one of the greatest sources of your stress — the “law of unintended consequences” — affects every founder, and that this is a good thing, because it is sometimes responsible for truly epic, if surprising, innovations (Web2.0).

A friend of mine mentioned something to me recently. He commented that a site he works with recently changed the text on their registration button from “Register here” to “Register for free” and, as a result, registrations shot up.

That really blew me away.

Clearly pretty small decisions can have an enormous and disproportionate impact.

This got me thinking and something else occurred to me, namely how a similarly small decision caused by search engine spam created the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Read More about Aroxo: How Little Decisions Matter — A Lot