A new world of scamsters
Facebook games — Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Restaurant City — have become surprisingly effective at diverting time wasters among the social-networking crowd. More than 63 million people alone play FarmVille. But now accusations have surfaced that the games can lead some more gullible players, including children, into Internet scams, especially if they have a cell phone.
I've seen this coming for a long time now. More and more, the solution to monetizing things like Twitter and Facebook are pyramid schemes, affiliate marketing scams, and lead-gen trickery. The recent Facebook/Zygna/Offerpal debacle is simple the most wide-spread and nefarious to date. I don't know what the solution is, but I have a feeling it's only going to get worse before it gets better. Much worse.
I remember when email inboxes used to be littered with spam. That was back in the dark times, before Gmail. This little company called Google came out with Gmail and changed email forever. Gmail's spam filter was breakthrough in its effectiveness and accuracy in stopping spam. Google forced everyone else to step up their game and make spam filtering a feature worth switching your email address for.
Today, email spam isn't even an issue. I probably average less than one piece of spam a month. When I can't figure out how to unsubscribe from a newsletter I someone ended up on, I just add it to spam and it's gone forever. Gmail goes the extra mile and now lets you know which pieces of junk mail are asscoiated with phising schemes. This is the kind of control we need now on Facebook before it gets too late.
I want to block most applications on Facebook. FarmVille needs to be classified as spam. When you click on anything having to do with a Zynga application you should get a giant warning that tells you other users have reported it as a possible phishing scheme. I wish there was a setting to block all applications that weren't on a special "allow" list. I don't want to see every update or newsfeed injection created by every game played and ever quiz ever made. And Twitter... well, Twitter is a whole different bucket of worms.
Twitter is a sea filled with spammers trying to sell you porn, affiliate programs, and links from clickbanks and link exchanges. It’s a scammers paradise, full of gullible people who have no idea what they are getting into. Trending Topics is damn near useless. 90% of what ends up trending is a result of bots hitting the API like mad.
If you want to know how to “monetize social media” just have a look at everything that the scamsters out are there doing today. They've figured it out. Sure, you’ll end up on everyone’s block list, but you’ll end up with a bucket of hard earned money made from pissing everyone off. Just make sure you don’t use your real picture on all those social profiles, or someone might run up to you on the street and beat you with their iPhone. Don't you know? There's a special badge for that on Foursquare.
