The MySpace spam roller coaster has been an interesting ride, but will it ever end?

The MySpace PR channel, “Tom,” has been ironically “slamming” spam in its messages sent to MySpace users because of the burdensome tactics the company feels it’s forced to implement in fighting spam. It’s ironic because, although the MySpace website has more users than any other social networking website, many of its numbers are quite inflated by automation tools such as bots and adders; and that’s interesting because inflated numbers for MySpace equals more ad revenue for MySpace. The problem is, its rigorous tactics to ward off the spam only:

1. Make the company less money by decreasing “hits”
2. Cost the company more money by increasing labor and hardware
3. Aggravate the users

It’s evident that phished accounts – accounts that have had the user name and password stolen in efforts to spam the friends of the account – are nothing short of bad user experiences either, but making all MySpace users suffer by entering letter and number combinations for just about every action on MySpace is not a good solution to spam.

The reason Facebook has not had this type of problem is primarily due to its closed network system. To access most Facebook profiles, one must become a user and login. And also, let’s face it: Facebook developers are little more advanced than the MySpace dudes. Even so, MySpace still dominates the market, but their ruthless tactics and messy coding tricks don’t give the site a promising future.

In the MySpace battle against spam the company has locked people out of their accounts, told people that they’ve been phished when they haven’t, and even deleted legitimate messages and accounts accidentally.

if you got locked for being phished in the last hour, it’s a bug! we’re working on fixing it right now. sorry about that! the mechanism to detect if your account has been phished has been very powerful for stopping phishing, but it went a little haywire just now. things should be back to normal soon! if you’re wondering what phishing is, read my blog

Tom

Funny enough, even Tom’s account has been phished before to send out messages about Gucci Bags!