Alex Hopmann’s Blog

It is great to see Facebook taking some measures to reduce spam. Since I’ve been working on some Facebook (and related) type things lately I think about these issues a lot.

The deeper issue is that the Facebook app authors are taking this “land grab” “get rich quick” approach. Except they aren’t getting rich, they are getting “users” that when abused have no value.

My favorite latest example is Social.IM. This looked like a very cool thing- its an IM application that is integrated with Facebook so it automatically knows my Friends List from Facebook. This is a perfect example of the kind of application that really leverages the social networks knowledge of my interactions with others, while providing a useful function. If this app worked well, it would quickly be my main IM client.

But its currently on the road to being deleted from my machine for two reasons. The first is just that the client is not done very well. The chat flickers a ton, every time you type it jumps the whole window, and it has a huge block for every line you type with your user tile. After GTalk shipped, it felt like there was a new standard for the baseline experience in IM, and these guys are far from that to the point where using it is annoying.

But the worse problem is that they try to abuse me to spam my friends to install their thing. The saddest part here is they don’t even need to- when I’m running the app I have a list of my friends, those who are running Social.IM and those who aren’t. If I want to talk to one of those that are not running it, I can click on their name and invite them. Great.

Why do they pester me to invite a bunch of people when I first sign up too? Completely unnecessary- your sign up experience should get people into your app as quickly as possible without that kind of hassle. Then I’m chatting with someone and playing with the smiley’s. They have some funny bigger ones, and I click on one to my shock my browser opens-

They want me to spam my friends to unlock some damn smiley’s? This is classic “abuse your customers” stuff and I’d thought it had gone out of fashion a few years ago but Social.IM has brought it back. Social.IM is going on my “ban” list until they cut this crap out.

Hopefully as people figure out how to make Facebook stuff sucesful, they will focus on customer value, great experiences, and making the social aspects (invites, news feeds, etc) tied to relevant things (like I want to chat with you) rather than spam.