Has Facebook Become Another Form Of Spam?

Most people who use social bookmarking know about Facebook or will within the near future. It's another web media group similar to others such as de-lic-ious, digg and the list goes on. It has become an extremely popular resource for college students and has spread in popularity to just about anyone.

A recent report from Webpronews dated May 18th stated that Canadians are using Facebook more than any other country, roughly 10% of Facebook's population, an estimating 2 million Canadian users. Why the sudden surge in Canadian members?

My theory is the amount of spam and tactics that are bringing these people online. Don't get me wrong I use Facebook to and find it to be a great resource for both personal and public.

Lately there has been a huge amount of groups that are created for the purpose of winning money. A perfect example would be the radio contest 106.1 The Edge. This is a Canadian Radio station that is asking members to create the largest unique group to win $7000 CDN

Great contest you think, till you go search Facebook and see the amount of members who are trying to win. With this type of promotion comes the spam, and an abundance of this is flying around due to the overwhelming popularity of this contest. People are sending out invites left right and center trying to get the biggest group going, they are practically begging anyone who will here them out.

Is this what social bookmarking was meant for? Has it resorted to a complete and useless waste of time? There are currently 550 groups directly related to this contest alone with an average of 5 new groups started each day.

Toronto, has over half a million members in Facebook and it is spiking at a huge rate as reported in Webpronews. Well given that this radio station is aired in this city could this have something to do with it.

If you go to the 102.1 The Edge and watch the youtube video they specifically talk about spam related issues resulting from this promotion, and how Facebook will not tolerate it. The staff at 102.1 has made it into a complete joke resulting in the abuse of social bookmarking





A quote right off the edge website tells viewers to:

"Invite as many people as possible to join your group. Close friends, friends of friends, family, old school buddies, neighbors you don't even speak to, ANYONE!!! You won't qualify to win $7,000 unless you are near the top of the leaderboard when it comes to how large your group is, so friends are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!"

Is this telling visitors that spam is not acceptable? Spam has become acceptable and with it has brought a new phase into social bookmarking. I think social bookmarking is taking a turn into more produced garbage than constructive becoming the new form of spam, at least where Facebook is concerned.