one thing i’d say about friendbot, the people who created it must now be VERY VERY rich.

thanks for your blog, it cheered me up!

Jools

PS

Dear Silent Bob (number 36)

your hypocritic morals typify the christian faith. your god wont save you… hell waits for you.

I mean, who doesn’t want a Newsvine spam-bot? It will be another indicator of adoption into the mainstream!

So I made my little post about getting a junk Friend request. Not an hour later and I got three more. Not a minute after that, one of my friends got suckered into an auto-post javascript (very crap).

Sigh…

I think it’s pretty obvious why someone would pay for a MySpace bot. It’s the same reason they pay for scripts to create splogs or spammy blog comments – to make money.

“Number two, this shatters my long-standing opinion that Swedish girls named Kimberly can’t possibly be evil.”

LOL.

If they would start selling via their own ad servers, most of these problems should go away. I’ve wondered for a bit now why they haven’t streamlined their marketing dept.

Tim: MySpace profiles for a company are a strong way to build a personal company presence. It lets people feel like they are “connected”, much socially the same way as blogs work with the older generation. Imagine a kid that put “Nintendo” on his friend list, and gets a bulliten when they changed the “Revolution” to the “Wii”. He’d feel like that (spam) personal message was meant for him.

We have allready fixed this vulnerability and have reported this to the U.S. FBI and would appreciate all help you can offer us in the persecution of this criminal. Thank you.

Harsh place that MySpace bot community.

It’s funny though, when I read the letters from the administrator, “Kimberly”, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a letter from the Charles Dickens book Nicholas Nickleby. There were a few phrases that I thought were very similar:

‘SIR,

‘My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen.

‘We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays. You will judge from this that he has been brought very low.

‘When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.

‘Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.

‘The monster having sasiated his thirst for blood ran away, taking with him a boy of desperate character that he had excited to rebellyon, and a garnet ring belonging to my ma, and not having been apprehended by the constables is supposed to have been took up by some stage-coach. My pa begs that if he comes to you the ring may be returned, and that you will let the thief and assassin go, as if we prosecuted him he would only be transported, and if he is let go he is sure to be hung before long which will save us trouble and be much more satisfactory. Hoping to hear from you when convenient

‘I remain ‘Yours and cetrer ‘FANNY SQUEERS.

‘P.S. I pity his ignorance and despise him.’

Doesn’t instill a whole lot of confidence, does it?

Maybe you should update your prejudice-file :P

But honestly, myspace is definitely interesting from a business / society perspective, but watching it from any other angle is like staring at a flaming car wreck – it’s ugly, often filled with mangled up people, and it should be cleared away ASAP.