Bloggasm

This is a little unsettling. Political correspondents for the New York Times trolled Facebook and messaged random 16-year-old friends of Cindy McCain’s daughter and this is what they sent to them:

I’m a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. So I’m reaching out to fellow parents at her kids’ schools.

Something about this just strikes me as creepy.

Many analysts agree that once social networking sites get their shit together that they’ll be prime real-estate for advertisers, primarily because they have so much personal info on their users, which in turn means highly-personalized ads. But other than the controversial Beacon program I haven’t seen much evidence for this until today.

When I logged into my account today I saw this ad in my news feed:

As most of you know, I’m a journalist. It wouldn’t be too hard to ascertain this from my Facebook profile — given that I’m listed as an English major grad and my place of employment is in my workplace info.

Is this just a coincidence or was Facebook able to scan my profile and deliver a targeted ad?

Either way, I did something I rarely do to advertisements on the internet: I clicked on it.

Some media-related links for your amusement:

1. What news outlets can learn from the porn industry. Let me just say that I agree with all the points made in those links. This is precisely why I announced not too long ago that I would begin covering the porn industry in this blog.

2. Tobias Buckell talks about freelancing full time and the importance of getting out of the house and socializing.

3. Ebook sales for the Sony Reader are still outpacing the sales for Amazon’s Kindle.

4. The perils of taking a press release and flipping it without making any follow-up phone calls.

5. Yes! Facebook is taking measures to cut down on the spam effect of its platform applications.

6. Those internet trolls that plague message boards? A court ruled that they can remain anonymous.

7. From Gizmodo: “If there was ever a time for a band to try going completely independent, this is it. Why give over 90% of your income away to greedy sleazebags when you can sell your music online without the middleman? This industry needs to be burned to the ground and built back up again; it’s broken and it seems less and less likely that it’ll be able to be fixed”

UPDATE: International Delete Your Myspace Account Day is finally here!

That’s it, I’ve had it. After months of only visiting my myspace profile in order to delete spam friend requests from half-nude women, I’ve reached the end of the line.

The other day I received an email from Myspace announcing something semi-relevant: “One of your friends is having a birthday this week.”

Intrigued for once, I actually opened the email to find out who was having a birthday, and was met with this:

Visit Myspace to find out who? No, I’m not going to fucking visit Myspace to find out who, there’s absolutely no reason why I should have to visit the website, wait for it to load because of the excessive banner ads, and then log in just so I can find out who is having a birthday. If you’re going to take the time and energy to spam my inbox with the message, then you can tell me in the email itself whose birthday it is.

I’ve been thinking about deleting my Myspace account almost since the day I got it but always opted out of doing so because of the few friends I have who don’t have Facebook accounts. But by remaining on Myspace, I realize, I’m becoming an enabler. I’m giving those friends no reason to switch over from Myspace by giving them access to my Myspace profile.

But rather than deleting my account right away, I’m going to hold off until January 30th so that other people have time to join me. I’d love to see a large number of people delete their accounts all at once in order to send Myspace a message: your website sucks.

So, if you’re reading this and you’ve experienced any of the things on the list below, your account may be in need of deletion:

1. You rarely log in to Myspace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.

2. You spend five minutes writing a wall post only to hit an error message when you try to post it because of all the website glitches.

3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.

4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because Myspace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to myspace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

7. Your experience is hindered because of intrusive banner ads that either talk to you or try to reach out and block your view of what you’re trying to look at.

8. You read yet another news account about how some child predator using Myspace has abducted a little girl or that some hoax myspace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide.

9. You’re frustrated with the fact that Myspace doesn’t allow you to post your contact info, meaning to contact someone you can only use Myspace’s glitchy Instant Messenger, message/email system, or wall commenting.

10. You’re tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture.

Have any of these things happened to you? Well you’re the perfect candidate for Myspace deletion. Join me on Wednesday, January 30th by deleting your Myspace account. You won’t regret it!

UPDATE: A commenter was kind enough to create a facebook group devoted to International Delete Your Myspace Account Day.

UPDATE 2: A Myspace spokeswoman has responded to International Delete Your Myspace Account Day.

UPDATE 3: If any journalists or bloggers would like to interview me about International Delete Your Myspace Account Day, please email me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com for additional contact info.

1. The greatest science fiction porn of all time

2. I’ve heard of elaborate Facebook pranks, and I’ve reported on some here, but I think if you manage to trick the entire French media into believing your prank then you get to take home the gold medal.

3. I use Google as much as the next person, but let’s face it, their algorithm has some serious flaws.

4. A former editor for The New Republic has died. Luckily for him, he stopped working there when the magazine still had some credibility.

5. Why you shouldn’t exercise to indie rock

6. When I heard that The Virginia Pilot was for sale (Disclaimer: I work for a competing newspaper), the last thing I was expecting was for Pat “700 club” Robertson to consider buying it.

7. Some interesting Twitter messages that have emerged from the presidential press bus.

8. The blogosphere increases its influence on the 2008 presidential election.

I have written before about the fetishistic egotistical trends within the Facebook community, most noticeably the tendency to create groups with the sole purpose of amassing as many members as possible. Such tendencies are part of a larger cluttering of the social network that seems bent on flooding you with so much information that Facebook is rendered almost useless.

More disturbing, though, is the uptick in the number of fraudulent groups that have grown in popularity. Last year, a person who claimed to a be a man named “Brody Ruckus” created a group that told potential members that if they joined en mass, then his girlfriend would agree to a threesome and invite another girl to join them for some coital activities.

As I reported soon after the group was created, Ruckus was a fraud, and his/her/its lies were most likely attempts to sell music through a company called Ruckus Music.

He did have some short-lived success, however, and he has paved the way for a profusion of other fraudulent groups.

A few days ago, a group called “If 1,000,000 People Join I Won’t Put My Dog To Sleep!” was created by a person supposedly named “Mark Talon.” Before I even quote from him, let me prelude his atrocious grammar with an old-fashioned “[sic].”

“My dog just recently bit someone and he’s only a few months old….,” Talon writes. “They are suing, I can’t afford to pay for it, so I was offered that if I put him to sleep i’d pay a lot less…. I don’t want to… So I asked advertisers that if I came up with 1,000, 000 people how much could I get…. They said they would give me enough to pay the whole lawsuit amount and to be able to put him through the best dog training!”

His affinity for exclamation points only increases in intensity further down the page. It’s mere child’s play to debunk his claims. Firstly, there are no “advertisers” that exist in the group, other than the advertisers that go through Facebook’s channel, which have nothing to do with group creators. His grasp of the legal system is laughable at best — his summary of the lawsuit against him is like a 7-year-old’s reenactment of Law & Order. And the cherry on top of the icing? His facebook profile picture was blatantly taken from a Busted Tees website.

But though investigating these things might provide one with some pleasure, I knew that this group was a fake after reading the first paragraph. What worries me, though, is the popularity of the group.

As of this writing, the group has over 200,000 members, meaning that its existence is being announced to millions of news feeds. A simpleton with the grammar of an elementary school kid has seemingly risen through the upper echelons and become a social powerhouse. Now, consider if this imbecile actually did want to promote some commercial product with a simple link near the top of the group. He would be unstoppable in creating thousands of page views to whatever site he linked to. He has become a PR company’s dream.

Which leads me to this question: Why should fraudster PR companies bother with sites like Digg and Reddit when Facebook is obviously much easier to game? The founders of Digg devote a significant amount of time to finding ways to oust fraudulent diggers, so perhaps facebook can become a new haven where they can thrive.

UPDATE: It appears that the group has been taken down. I’m guessing that Facebook employees didn’t like the fact that this guy was fraudulently claiming that its advertisers were somehow cooperating with him.

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2. Blogger’s pseudonym gets deleted from Facebook