Saturday, November 21, 2009

Facebook Takes Action Against USocial


“Facebook has threatened legal action against a service that sells friends on the social networking site.”

I was so pleased when I first read about this. For those who don’t know what USocial is, it is a firm that allows users to buy (eek!) Facebook and Twitter friends/followers. For just $87, you can get 1,000 Twitter followers.

Great creativity but buying “friends” just ain’t right.

Whether it is from the user or business point of view, I see little use of such services. Okay, maybe it does create some artificial buzz but in the long run, I don’t see how it could work out. Nonetheless, USocial seems to be doing pretty well judging from their audacious half million offer to Twitter for a homepage ad space.

More from BBC:

“Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to USocial claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.”

“USocial defended itself against Facebook’s claims, saying that it did not spam users or use web tools to gather information about profiles.

However, in response to the legal letters, USocial said it would delete the login information it had collected and broadly stop offering to sell Facebook friends.”

usocial took it down

Seems like USocial has taken the service off but its “buy-Twitter-followers” service is still available. Would Twitter send it a warning soon?

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