Tag Archive for 'complaint'

People have spent years trying to clear their email inbox of spam. Ads for Russian wives, male "joint" enlargement, and that poor poor girl who needs the kidney transplant in Nigeria have plagued us all. I have spent years teaching my GMail how to handle these scams that only waste space in my inbox and because they care about customer feedback they have nearly perfected their spam filters. So what does that have to do with Facebook?

Facebook has a nice little feature called Applications. You can hook your account up to these little games and apps that toy with you and provide all sorts of entertainment. Apps like "When will I become a millionaire", "Which friend do you have a crush on", and "Who is looking at my profile" are all available at a click. Not to mention the ever popular "villes" and "wars". Farmville, Yoville, Toyville, Mafia Wars, Sheep Wars, and Farmville Wars. The problem with this though is the fact that when you sign up for an app or game like "What celebrity underwear are you" all of your friends not only get notified on their wall with your results, they also have to be bombarded with invites to get them to play. This, for lack of a better definition is what we in the real world and especially the computer world call Spam. The problem is anyone who actually wants to use Facebook to keep up with friends and be constructive has to systematically "hide" and "block" all of this crap that shows up on their wall. This begs the question why is email spam which is considered a crime in some situations unacceptable and yet Facebook app spam is ok?

I had my Grandmother sign up for a Facebook so she could keep up with the family, view pictures, and reconnect with old friends. She is by no means computer illiterate and found it simple to leave comments and send messages, it was a whole new world of communication for her. Not two weeks after her initial sign up and her Facebook account was no longer usable. She without even being aware had been baited into accepting app requests with notifications like "One of your friends tagged you in a photo, click here to see it!". Except no one had tagged her, she was unknowingly being scammed into signing up for an application. Had this not occurred on Facebook people would call that "social engineering" and "malicious tactics used by hackers to infiltrate your computer". On Facebook though it's called the "Give a Friend a Star" app.

So what to do about nothing I suppose? I would love to see Facebook implement an "opt-out" feature which would be available for people who never use and never will use these glorified spam bots. I doubt though that this will come to fruition as Facebook thrives on the existence of these applications. It has become a large chunk of their business platform. Unfortunately for most though this will only be part of Facebook's eventual downfall. Through natural market selection another company will come to be and it will steer clear from these accepted forms of spam. At the very least Facebook should provide better tools to filter this mess. I realize they have buttons to "block invitations from this friend" but they do not have an ignore all button for the news feed. As an example I have attached a video of what my ignore list looks like. There must be over a few hundred apps in the list and it only grows daily.

Any tips? Thoughts, comments? I'm all ears.