Alright, like Burger King: have it your way.

It’s just that it would be easy to read someone’s myspace cookie, which contains their “friend id”, store it in a database, and then run a nightly perl script to plug the thousands of friend ids into myspace’s generic URLs.

They’ve been doing the same thing with e-mail addresses for years. Reading an amazon or ebay cookie. Until amazon and ebay got smart enough to stop storing peoples’ e-mails in the cookies. Myspace’s developers are just morons.

Where do you think all those “enlarge your member” e-mails come from? Why is it that I don’t know very many women who get those?

I’m not sure that’s true…I think a lot of people would jump at the chance to “exclusively partner” with Facebook to make the only app of its kind.

heapy: Not sure if I agree with you assessment of how the spammers get to your myspace account. The true answer is to properly restrict how people are able to add you and send you messages.

myspace is a joke full of phony coders who only care about their dirty money. everything interesting that they do is funded by stupid movies. myspace is just one big advertisement.

anyway, the only way fake porn stars will add you on myspace is if you’re looking at those sites to begin with. they read your myspace cookie. it’s a very simple tactic.

delete your cookies the next time you get the urge, man :-p

“In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that “work” in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.”
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071406.html

I hate tackiness as much as the next person. Much of MySpace reminds me too much of the frumpy AOL homepage I made in 1997, to the point where it’s a bit too close to home to watch.

Like you, I valued the cleanness that Facebook has had up to this point. However, while the Facebook Platform shows the potential to introduce “ugly”, it also shows the potential for thousands of developers to expand Facebook in directions the creators never contemplated.

Is there too much duplication right now? Certainly. You don’t need 5 different Poke apps, especially since if you have to add the poke app when you get poked. Each social networking app has always been a “walled garden” of sorts. Now Facebook has made itself to be a big walled garden with as many walled gardens on the inside as there are apps. I admit this is not a good thing.

However, to only let apps trickle in as they are approved by paid staff would kill people’s interest in making programs for the Facebook platform.