Categories: Articles

MySpace Adder Friend Requester – Welcome To MySpace Spam

This is where it all starts going to hell. One of the hottest online tools right now is automation software that enables you to add an unlimited amount of friends to your MySpace.
Welcome to MySpace Spam. Don’t pretend like you didn’t expect this.
These “friend management programs” have figured out a way to bypass the CAPTCHA – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (it looks like a box, with disfigured text and a gradient fill that must be re-typed in), customize comments and messages.
Now with a couple of keyboard strokes and clicks on a mouse, you can spam the entire MySpace world in hopes that some people will be foolish enough to add you, hence creating much more MySpace power.
Friend Management Programs will do one of two things: create so much unwanted requests for adds that the community starts to dwindle and stops using MySpace (too much spam). Or, we will experience a new concept that I have been exploring – Digital Darwinism.
Digital Darwinism is the same “survival of the fittest” concepts Charles Darwin presented, but for the digital space. If people abuse the power and spirit of Web 2.0 – like a Blog created simply for link love – the greater community will ignore it, spending their time and attention on stuff that matters and the Blog created solely for link love will become extinct (no traffic, no readers, no links – so why do it?).
Either way, communities like MySpace are now forced to develop even better technologies that can identify and stop tools like Friend Management Software. It has come to this: people creating technology to not only beat the system, but to make it easier to start a relationship. Online or offline, relationships take time, trust and openness to create.
Can automation technology replicate how we make friends and connect?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.