Major Social-Networks Spam Their Way to Success

What is the legality behind this kind of instant-millionaire spam scam

[solidcore]

My analogy into how huge sites like Facebook appear out of the dark

It has come to my attention, over the last few years most of all the top social-networks (facebook, bebo, etc) naming a few... are all linked to one real method of growth.

1) User recieved e-mail in the inbox from a friend telling them to join Facebook

We can analyse that this e-mail was sent from facebook's mailing servers and that the email was never sent from the friends receiptant address or IP.

2) You are in the sign-up process and you reach a "invite your friends to this service" page... you sign-in to your 'contact address book' on yahoo/aol/msn/gmail etc...then facebook rolls out friend invites to those who are not part of the site -for those who are they simply tell them you joined and ask you to confirm them as a friend

What can we analyse here... by this point the site is a viral worm, every sign-up has the oppertunity to grow 50-500+ sign-up on average this may very depending on the users contact list.

Fact is all social-networks really are, is a viral method of making their site grow overnight/weekend... and at what point is the legality of this system going to stop or be made legal for everyone

Are we allowed to have the same system to tell our friends about our sites to tell their friends to join up and make our million bucks?

Answer: i dont think we are. (spam reasons).

[solidcore]

I'd like to note that in the first year of facebook growth they did not spam.. but in 2007-2008 they managed to use the spam method to grow to what they are now.

Look at alexa graph and you'll see the basic principle of campaign (uni/colleges) growth 2006-2007, and the mail growth 2007-2008.

Ref: [alexa.com...]

(select: 3 year period)

[rogerd]

To the extent that the friend originates the email with a request, I don't see a problem. It's not much different than if I decide to send an article link to a few friends from nytimes.com.

Where it can get out of hand these days are the screens that encourage one to blast out some kind of invite or update to one's whole friend list.

It seems like Facebook is taking steps to cut down on such activity to avoid deluging members with potloads of updates, invites, notifications, etc.

[rogerd]

Actually, here's some discussion of that: [webmasterworld.com...]

[aranmulamirror]

This is beyond any arguments, those sites using some spam mechanism to build up their traffic and headcount. but one more question arises here, like whats the security for the userid and password of our Yahoo/GMail/MSN account which we are giving to them.

also can we consider such invitations ( with or without the knowledge of our friends) as SPAMS and treat them under any cyber laws?

[realmaverick]

I put this under viral marketing and without a great concept, it wouldn't work.