Dog Facebook spam
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.
Somehow, the psychology of Facebook convinced even some of my smartest friends to forward this picture of a dog to all their Facebook friends.
Super Wall, the FB app mechanism used, recently made a big change: sending notifications to all of your friends any time you receive anything from one of your friends, even if that's not a friend you have in common.
That increased the amount of Super Wall notifications I was seeing on my profile page, so I removed Super Wall from my Facebook page - I don't care that you received a photo or a message from a friend of yours - I care about friends of mine, not yours.
Unfortunately, while my Facebook friends still have Super Wall included on their own pages, I still get the notifications that they've sent something from their own Super Wall.
So when one clever person sent this cute-ish photo of a dog with the message "forward this and see what happens" a great many of my friends forwarded it to see what happened. I didn't forward it, not being a user of Super Wall anymore, but I was able to see what happened.
Nothing happened.
Not unless you count a few laughs for the original sender as he saw his dog photo spread massively thru the Facebook-o-sphere.
Oh, there was the slight disappointment for all the Facebook users who found out they'd been fooled, of course.
Minor irritation multiplied by a gazillion users should matter to Facebook, but doesn't appear to... yet.
Many more of these social engineering exercises and Facebook could see a decline in time-on-network as people get peeved and stop coming back.
I've already spoken to many people who are getting annoyed by spam from Facebook apps, advertisements in newsfeeds not targeted at them that they can't turn off, and friends who never think of anything intelligent to say on a platform that isn't intelligent enough to help them with it.
Only growing pains, but they need to be addressed soon...
