Here are Four Design Links that interested me this week. Hope you enjoy!
1. How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro
As a follow up to their coverage of social gaming scams, Tech Crunch posted this great article on the other dark side of social games: collecting your personal data and using it to spam (and scam some more).
An excerpt:
People on Facebook won’t pay for anything. They don’t have credit cards, they don’t want credit cards, and they are not interested in shopping. But you can trick them into doing one of three things:
- Download a toolbar: It could be spyware (such as Zango) or something more legitimate, such as Webfetti or Zwinkys.
- Give up their email address: You’ve won a “free” camera or perhaps you’ve been selected as a tester for a new Macbook Pro (which you get to keep at the end of the test). Just tell us where you want us to ship it.
- Give up their phone number: You took the IQ Quiz, so give us your phone number and we’ll tell you your score. Never mind that you’ll get billed $20 a month or perhaps be tricked into inviting 10 other friends to beat your score.
It's worth a read to see what's at stake for consumers and the kinds of things that happen any time a new platform comes along without enough regulation.
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Nick — Nov 12, 2009
Spambots are getting a lot smarter at harvesting email addresses from web pages. Nobody wants spam. Hence, we need a solution that's going to simultaneously save our Inboxes and not give our readers a pain in the neck.
Putting an email address on a website is a lot trickier proposition than it used to be. These days, the web is populated with evil spambots, crawling the web and scraping email addresses off websites, which they can then use to solicit your interest in perverse sexual apparatus or imitation Rolex wristwatches.
But for those of us who are selling something, we have no choice but to provide a way for our readers to contact us. Now, in the past, many things have been done to accomplish this: overly elaborate or unnecessary contact forms, replacing part or all of an email address with an image, or munging an email address.
All three of these techniques are unsatisfactory. First, all of these techniques are often beatable by smart spambots. Second, and even more importantly, the bottom line from a usability perspective is quite simple: These strategies convolute things for users. The easiest interface element we can provide for our users is link that, when clicked, opens up a new email addressed to us in their email client.
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Paul — Jul 30, 2008
