Now before you start telling me how Facebook’s worth over $11 billion and how it’s more popular that MySpace and you use it every day, I know already. I use it every day as well. I use it at home, I use it sneakily in work (just kidding ;)) and I use it on my phone. I even update my Facebook status from the pub just to let people know what I’m drinking.

It’s addictive, I get it.

However, Facebook has a problem. It has a disease. The disease is the great unwashed, or MySpace users as we call them today. Facebook was originally setup for use by students of Harvard and was later expanded to include other establishments such as MIT and Boston University. Then of course it was opened to all Universities, schools and eventually the public.

This, you see, is the problem. Facebook was created by the elite, to be used by the elite. It was not created for use by, well, for want of a better word, chavs. The once great exclusive domain, from which the intellectuals of this world could look down upon their MySpace brethren, from a safe distance, has been invaded and contaminated by the very people it was designed to exclude. Facebook is becoming corrupted with junk.

Much like MySpace before it, which is now a realm of fake profiles, awful imagery and impossible to load pages, Facebook is rapidly jamming up with the crud of the Internet. It’s becoming another MySpace. Whenever I log into my account now I’m hit with a barrage of requests from Zombies, Werewolves, Vampires, Scrabulous, Valentines, Sex Fantasies… you name it, it’s there. I have to go through all of them one by one hitting ‘ignore’.

Then when I click onto a friend’s page, a friend who has come from the MySpace zone (as we shall call it) I find their page scrolls on for several thousand miles with application after pointless application.

Why, for the love of cake why?

Now there are even applications that FORCE you to send it to 20 friends BEFORE you use it, so you have no idea of the quality (or lack of it) that you’re sending on. They even come with personalised messages from your friends saying how they’ve found they’re ideal sexual position; would you like to find yours? NO, I wouldn’t.

What all of this crap means is that Facebook is going to drive away the very individuals it was created for in the first place, drive them away to the next social networking site. Which in my opinion will become Linked In, but that’s for another post. This will happen unless Facebook gets a grip on the influx of low quality members and spammed up applications.

Will Facebook sort this out, or does Mark Zuckerberg care more about his exit strategy and the billions of dollars he’ll receive if Facebook has more members, more advertisers and more developers making shitty little applications?

I think it’s the latter, there’s an iceberg ahead for Zuckerberg, and he’s sailing straight for it.

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If you’ve ever been a moderator on a forum, or like me actually own a few forums, you’ll be familiar with spam users who sign up and paste sales letters into their one and only post before they’re banned. I’ve often wondered however what possesses companies to employ people to do this. It creates nothing bad publicity for your business.

I had one such spam post on one of my forums recently, which was immediately removed. The post was for the company: TELCOM COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED (naturally their name was all in upper case).

The moron was trying to sell mobile phones for this supposed UK based company, yet the post was made from the United States at 3:00 am. They’re supposed address is: 36A GORING ROAD, GORING BY SEA, WORTHING, WEST SUSSEX, BN12 4AD (again, written all in upper case, what an intellect).

If TELCOM COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED is actually a real company I’d advise anyone to stay away from them. Their marketing techniques are pure spam, therefore their business ethics must be equally low.

And just for the spam bots out there, the automated ones, here are the contact details of the low life who spammed up my forum:

Intrested buyers can contact me direct via:
tltd@ommail.com
telcomltdukoo1@yahoo.com
MSN.. telcomltduk1@hotmail.com
Wayne bruce
07024 074 657

Go on spam bots, do your thing and index the tosser.

Incidentally ‘Wayne Bruce’, adding “God Bless” at the end of your spam isn’t going to tempt people to contact you. The UK isn’t as stupidly obsessed with religion as your usual shit for brains customer.

God bless you Batman!

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You might remember this photo of American Pole Vaulter Alison Stokke that I put up on the site back in June last year.

Thanks to this photo I actually rank #1 in Google for an image search for Alison Stokke, which is bringing me an awful lot of traffic. She’s a good looking lady and has a lot of fans. Sadly though, that traffic has also brought the leechers. This guy has leeched the image from my site, stealing my bandwidth, causing me to have to block the image with the htaccess file.

If anyone is thinking of stealing images, don’t! I could have replaced the image with something very unpleasant, which would have given that chap the fright of his life. If you want to use an image you’ve found on someone else’s website the correct protocol is to upload the image to your OWN website and then give a link back to the original site.

Do not steal!

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