Here’s one for the “spoil it for the rest of us” category. My copy desk colleague Tim pointed me to this article, which talks about how an Australian company is promising to help people make more friends on Twitter and Facebook, allowing them to get their marketing message to an ever-growing list of people.
By now I’ve already seen annoying spam messages on Twitter from women in bikinis trying to get me to click here! I haven’t, and I won’t – I catch on to these things quickly, as I suspect most people do. But Facebook has been refreshingly clean of marketing messages, courtesy of a surprisingly strong Terms of Use policy, which bans the use of personal profiles for financial gain. Understandably, they’re miffed.
Twitter, on the other hand, seems more devoid of rules, and is a prime example of how wild wild west the Internet is – the marketing messages are mixed in with the ads. Or, if you’re a user, you can even get paid by sharing ad revenue for ads shown to your Twitter friends. As such, this may fly on Twitter.
Those on Facebook or Twitter who agree to be friends with random people may find things get a lot more annoying. As for me, I’m continuing my policy of pretty much only friending people or sites I distinctly know and talk to, with the hopes that I can minimize my exposure to the unnecessary noise.
And if you’re willing to pay to boost your friend count, because hey, who doesn’t want to have the most friends on Twitter and Facebook, check out uSocial‘s site for more insight as to what they do. I also am intrigued by the “unlimited press release” idea – who knew that was possible?
Great blog Josh, I just RSS subscribed.
Comment by bowman — September 4th, 2009 @ 11:09 pm
Hey,Fantastic post, although i’m more concerned in what will take place out of the google vs facebook social network war. I haven’t discovered much news on it lately, which quite likely implies that it is definitely not that far off, but i’ve a feeling its likely to lead to many big improvements to social networks. I think, i would rather facebook left the battle still in the lead because google’s already large enough, plus they currently hold too much data on absolutely everyone. I do not feel that the two can exist though, either google’s social network will control or totally crash. Just what does everybody else believe?
Comment by Dana Gose — August 25th, 2010 @ 4:11 pm