With the steady growth that Friendfeed is experiencing, it’s just a matter of time before the problem of spam infiltrates it.Friendfeed is still the shiny new toy that only the people in the know, know about. Because of this, the critical masses and the spammers have not caught on quite yet. The clock is ticking….
The convenient 6 click registration form makes it’s easy for spammers to sign up for “disposable accounts”, and to set up shop in seconds. The smarter spammers will use scripts to automate the sign up process. This will allow them to create several hundred or more throw away accounts at any given time.
The spammers have an arsenal of forty one services at there disposal. Any one of these services can be set up and deployed in seconds. Rooms can be created for any topic or product imaginable. It wont be long before the Viagra spam email of the day arrives and is directing us to the Viagra room on Friendfeed.
Friendfeed gives the spammers multiple ways of getting a message out. The most common would be to post the spam-vertised sites directly to the feed. The handy Friendfeed bookmarklet would accomplish this with ease. The rooms would be filled with link bait galore, allowing spammers more ways to monetize courtesy of, RSS feeds injected with AdSense as one example. The purveyors of porn might stand to monetize the most. They can take full advantage of full multimedia, using video clips, images, text and now even audio, making their rooms into free mini adult porn sites. Rooms have made the possibilities endless. The spammers will pick up on this soon enough.
The community, up to this point, has a done an excellent job of policing itself. What I would like to see is some type of flagging mechanism put into place, such as is implemented on Craigslist. I would also like to see visible “report or flag this” links on all member feeds and rooms.
What other forms of spam will Friendfeed face?
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12 Responses to The inevitable ticking time bomb awaiting Friendfeed.
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CONNECT WITH MIKE
How is this problem different from blog spam or any other type of spam on public systems? You write this as it is a unique phenomenon.
FAIL.
Awesome way to get people clicking on the link. Lame article, though. Shows clearly that you don't know what you're talking about.
funny some commenters think like this is no big deal or it won't happen, maybe they are spammers. flag this is ok but it would need a high enough number so it does not have to be managed by some big staff AND cannot be abused by over zealous people.
Michael, first off, I don't understand why people criticize you for writing this post. You've raised a valid concern.
I've noticed that when someone invites you to a room, not only do you receive an email from FriendFeed, the invite is also stuck on the right-hand side of your FriendFeed page.
That's one feature that I won't lose sleep over if they removed it.
I trust that FriendFeed folks are working on anti-spam measures, because FriendFeed has the potential to be a spammer's wet-dream.
Not only can spammers very easily push their content in the faces of FriendFeed members, they can also abuse the service for getting additional “followed” backlinks to their sites and pages.
the viagra room already directs to a viagra user which seems to be in place to prevent anyone from creating this very thing.
How is this problem different from blog spam or any other type of spam on public systems? You write this as it is a unique phenomenon.
FAIL.
Awesome way to get people clicking on the link. Lame article, though. Shows clearly that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
funny some commenters think like this is no big deal or it won’t happen, maybe they are spammers. flag this is ok but it would need a high enough number so it does not have to be managed by some big staff AND cannot be abused by over zealous people.
Michael, first off, I don’t understand why people criticize you for writing this post. You’ve raised a valid concern.
I’ve noticed that when someone invites you to a room, not only do you receive an email from FriendFeed, the invite is also stuck on the right-hand side of your FriendFeed page.
That’s one feature that I won’t lose sleep over if they removed it.
I trust that FriendFeed folks are working on anti-spam measures, because FriendFeed has the potential to be a spammer’s wet-dream.
Not only can spammers very easily push their content in the faces of FriendFeed members, they can also abuse the service for getting additional “followed” backlinks to their sites and pages.
the viagra room already directs to a viagra user which seems to be in place to prevent anyone from creating this very thing.
When rooms were first announced there was quite a run of people registering spammy sounding room names (picked some up myself). Most such rooms are completely empty and were just taken to deny spammers a nice URL on a trusted site.
The thing that will save FriendFeed is its subscription model – you actively subscribe to people and very few users are going to subscribe to spammers. It's also really easy to block people so even spammers that are friends of friends disappear quickly. For FriendFeed's users, spam should not be much of a problem.
For the developers & admins, it will be a problem if automated submissions happen as the article predicts and swamp the servers.
When rooms were first announced there was quite a run of people registering spammy sounding room names (picked some up myself). Most such rooms are completely empty and were just taken to deny spammers a nice URL on a trusted site.
The thing that will save FriendFeed is its subscription model – you actively subscribe to people and very few users are going to subscribe to spammers. It’s also really easy to block people so even spammers that are friends of friends disappear quickly. For FriendFeed’s users, spam should not be much of a problem.
For the developers & admins, it will be a problem if automated submissions happen as the article predicts and swamp the servers.