[Infowarrior] - Facebook "Like Farms" Are Spamming Up Your News Feed

[Richard Forno]

I'll take the article at its word -- I'm not on FB and have no desire to be!    -rick


Facebook "Like Farms" Are Spamming Up Your News Feed

Nick Saint | Aug. 30, 2010, 1:39 PM | 1,140 |   1

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-like-buttons-spawn-a-new-form-of-spam-2010-8

One of the bigger announcements to come out of Facebook's controversial keynote at its developer conference last spring was the introduction of "Like buttons" that can be placed anywhere on the web, allowing people to register their approval of content on third-party sites without leaving them. It's a big part of Facebook's push to put its brand everywhere on the Internet, and to make being logged into the social network central to users' experience of just about everything online.

It's also the basis for a new type of business: the like farm.

By default, when one of your Facebook friends like something, it shows up in your news feed. Recently, we've noticed that our feeds are clogged with dozens of weird likes from just a couple of friends, like the ones shown here. They look like links to blog posts or articles, but in fact, the title is the content. Each of these updates links to an entry on one of dozens of like farms, where any user can submit these updates, and pump them into Facebook by liking them. These sites are entirely comprised of pithy updates, like buttons, and, of course, ads:

Basically, these sites are enabling the equivalent of Twitter hash tag jokes on Facebook; people see funny sentences pop up in their streams, and indicate their approval by liking them. This is the Facebook equivalent of retweeting, since all of your friends are notified that you liked the blurb. Many of these entries have been liked by tens of thousands of users, all of whose friends see the updates, which links to the sites, so this is no doubt generating non-negligible ad revenue despite requiring zero effort on the part of the sites' creators. The biggest we've seen, Likey.net, is already seeing over a million uniques per month.

Once an update has enough likes, it can spread entirely on Facebook. But to get the process started, someone has to have gone to the site and submitted it in the first place. It's hard to say why -- unlike on Twitter, the original poster of these updates isn't referenced or credited in any way. And the sites look and feel extremely spammy. At least one of them has already been flagged as an attack site by Google, though it's not clear whether the site is itself malicious, or merely the target of third-party attacks.

Facebook has tried for a long time now to make its news feeds a Twitter-killer, but despite its much larger user base, it hasn't had much success there. The success of these like sites shows that there is some real hunger among some Facebook users for Twitter-style communication, and that Facebook isn't doing a good enough job enabling it on its own. The result isn't pretty.