Is a MySpace member link an endorsement?

Are there paid MySpace member endorsements?

[Webwork]

Just read an interesting post here about how a link in a MySpace member's profile (popular member?) was credited for building up someone else's forum by some 8000 new members over a period of less than a year.

So, do MySpace members sell endorsements?

Has anyone asked a popular member to put up a "link endorsement"? My guess is that this is happening in no small measure. No?

Isn't this the essence of buzz marketing? Target "popular" members or "thought/opinion leaders"?

Do you think, in time, that places link MySpace will place limits on outbound linking to commercial sites?

Is MySpace soon to be the next blog spam heaven?

Would MySpace be clueless to how members might be using TheirSpace for personal gain? Geez, what a world in which the "free service" - which makes money on the activities/participation of members - in turn is used by members to make money for themselves (without sharing with MySpace).

Therefore, in due course, is MySpace doomed to a certain climate of commercialization? Will their be values placed on links: Member X gets #### traffic and therefore he/she can command $$$ for a link? (Black market linking?)

What happens when MemberX blasts MemberY's outbound link to SiteA - saying SiteA is junk - and both MemberX and MemberY are on the take for different commercial interests? What happens when they're outed? Are they banned by MySpace? Are they shunned by members? OR, in the world of free music downloads and kids looking to make a buck are they the new heroes?

I do so look forward to the exploitation of social networking by link builders.

You?

[Iguana]

There are already people selling a place in their "top 8 friends" on ebay. But this isn't related to SEO so far as I can tell - just to appear more popular. There are also programs that can apply for hundreds of friends every day (used to be thousands but MySpace stopped that by suspending accounts)

I haven't received any requests for actual links - I think such a thing would be regarded as very uncool. But I have been checking PRs of pages and seen the areas excluded by the robots.txt. I do have a couple of music sites so I am interested in linking possibilities.

I feel the loss of innocence coming on. I would pay money for a MySpace account from an early joiner.

[roxyyo]

Hmmm, I'd try and get a link straight from "Tom," LOL. Pay him whatever he asks.

[sugarrae]

>>>Do you think, in time, that places link MySpace will place limits on outbound linking to commercial sites

They'd never be able to do it. Last I checked, Yahoo music and most band sites were commercial. ;-)

That said, why shouldn't they be able to sell their fame. Every reality show "star" out there takes everything they can get from their fame. Why not bloggers or "cool people". Anything that becomes popular eventually becomes commercial IMHO.

Good topic.

[Kirby]

>I do so look forward to the exploitation of social networking by link builders.

That day was yesterday. Just like usweb paying bloggers for links, social networking is for sale.

[roxyyo]

Wow, MySpace was just bought for something like $580 million dollars. Not bad.

[exosus]

There are definitely paid MySpace member endorsements with the increase of programs to mass add friends and send messages via MySpace. You can actually hire people to do it for you, or you can just purchase a program and do it yourself. It is technically against MySpace's terms of service, so I wouldn't suggest it. Just FYI. However, I was recently curious about the subject, so I did a bit of research into it about a month ago and wrote an article about it.. Here it is:

Being the type of person that I am, I am always trying to beat another system. Not necessarily for personally use, but just because I enjoy doing it. I recently noticed for MySpace there were several programs out there that allowed you to literally send mass messages and friend requests to many users at a single time. Being curious, I decided to follow this up. It turns out, MySpace is very easy to program a spammer for. In fact, it took me a matter of 30 minutes to create a spammer that allowed me to send as many messages as I wanted undetected, or so I thought. Here are some interesting things to note about MySpace’s way to block spam. After 50 messages or friend requests MySpace requires you to type in a CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA is a simple image verification code you must look at and then type in. My first thought to beating this CAPTCHA was to create image recognition software. I created a pretty good setup very quickly to beat it, however it was taking too long to program and I was beginning to lose interest. After reading about what a few other MySpace bots could do, I learned that you can actually save the CAPTCHA and the cookie that came with it, write down the CAPTCHA, and save it for later use. After figuring this out, it took me another 30 minutes to implement it into my program. I then sat there and wrote out about 80 CAPTCHAs. I then ran the program again and the spammer began working in full force, adding a new friend about every half a second. Eventually I reached 500 friend requests where I was given a screen that said I had exceeded my daily limit. So here is the information I gathered about MySpace in my endeavors.

1) You can only do 50 processes, whether it be friend requests or messages until MySpace requires you to input a CAPTCHA.
2) After you input a CAPTCHA you will not be asked to input another CAPTCHA for on average about 8 more processes.
3) You can only do 500 processes a day per account.

Secondly, in order to see if I could target users, I created several ways to gather user ID lists based off of searches. The term I decided to test was World of Warcraft. The general search only gave me about 4,000 results. However, I added another function to search groups with the names World of Warcraft and get everyone’s user ID from there. I ended up with about 30,000 user IDs that I knew were interested in World of Warcraft.