Filed under: Internet, Social Software
MySpace's new anti-spam measures hardly useful
Interesting--though MySpace touts them as new, none of these features are essential. Nor are any of them especially useful. Nobody under 18 is going to block the over-18 crowd. That's frankly just silly because it cuts off potential messaging between parents and teenagers. Well, if you're a teen upset with your parents, maybe it makes sense.
Then there's the blocking non-friends from e-mailing you. You already have to be a friend to comment somebody's profile, so one wonders, if social-networking is the name of the game, how can it flourish if non-friends can't message each other and then become friends?
Probably the most useful anti-spam measure is the one not mentioned in their newsletter, the one that's been around for a while: the Captcha feature, which requires non-friends to enter a graphically-generated code before they can message you or send you a friend invite. Very handy and underutilized, Captcha nearly eliminates automated "garbage invites" from systems that can't deal with Captcha images. That's the only MySpace anti-spam measure worth using.
Despite a policy against unsolicited messaging, it's just too bad MySpace doesn't take their users' spam reports seriously. Could this be one of the reasons why so many of our business buddies have recently joined Facebook? Or is MySpace's permissiveness a strategic move to maintain their position as the sixth-most heavily trafficked web site?
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rTwelve said 7:39PM on 9-13-2007
MySpace also uses captcha prompts when you made certain edits to your profile, like div and embed tags. With a large fraction of 200 million profiles being constantly edited, I wish MySpace would look into a project like recaptcha.
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