Magic Hobo Fights Spam with Spam

By Tom Foremski - January 21, 2008

magic_hobo.jpg

For users of Facebook, inadvertently spamming your friends is one of the annoying features of using some of the Facebook apps. It is also embarrasing to share some personal stuff with a friend only to find that you sent the same message to everyone.

Plus there are things like Mortimer the travelling bear and other such nonsense that people accidentally spam their Facebook friends with. To put a stop to this, we now have the "Magic Hobo" which is an educational "spam" that explains the basic ways on how not to spam your friends.

I sent a "Magic Hobo" to my Facebook friends and now I have half-a-dozen more sitting on my walls and super walls, etc. It's funny to fight spam with spam, and the picture of the Magic Hobo is hilarious.

Here is the text that goes with it (BTW, send me a Facebook friend request, it is one way for me to get to know my readers.)

This is the Magic Hobo!

He will do STUFF ALL if you forward him on - But it's a great opportunity to send him on and spam all your Facebook Friends to say STOP sending me STUPID CRAP!

The stuffed dog does NOTHING when you forward him on...

I don't give a shit about Mortimer the Travelling Bear...

Unicef will NOT donate 5c for every forward that little starving child gets...

You CANNOT tell how many people visit your profile by spamming forward and pressing altF4 afterwards...

THINK BEFORE YOU FORWARD! Ask yourself: "Could this actually WORK?"
Chances are... No - It's just a stupid-ass ploy to clog your walls full of the same old crap again and again and again...

Join the fight against aimless spamming by spamming this forward to say "Just Say No!" to stupid-ass forwarding.

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January 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comment | Category: Mediasphere | Subscribe to SVW

Comments (2)

Tom - I received your magic hobo and it was much appreciated. This is why I now avoid facebook. The application spam and inadvertent friend spamming is annoying. I'm not sure what they can do because constraining this will be a disincentive to application development on the platform and I'm sure they don't want that. I wrote a post on app spamming a couple of weeks ago on my blog: http://tinyurl.com/2k4agf


Tom Foremski:

Darryl, you are spot on with your observation that the Facebook platform will prove less attractive to developers because of this spam capability that seems to come with nearly every application. It's what they call "viral" growth yet it will kill the goose.

If I try to send an email to all my friends I can be thrown off for "spamming" yet these applications can get away with it. I think that the "Magic Hobo" represents a watershed and it will indeed stop the spamming on Facebook or Facebook will lose a lot of users.


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