Robert Scoble, a popular tech blogger and Facebook user, recently found that a comment he wanted to post on the social networking site seemed to be censored. Scoble tried to comment on a post by someone he didn’t know personally. Instead of seeing the comment below the original post, he received a message informing him that his comment could not be posted as it was “irrelevant or inappropriate”. This seemed surprising as the comment was related to the original post and Scoble claims it was in no way unfit for publication.

Facebook comment censorship or bruised egos?

Facebook’s error message was misinterpreted by Scoble to imply that the social network had taken upon itself the task of analysing and censoring comments. In spite of this being quite contrary to Facebook’s stated policies, Scoble couldn’t perceive that his comments could ever be perceived as spam, so he automatically assumed that Facebook was censoring his text.

It is known that users have the right to inform Facebook about inappropriate messages and comments by flagging them. Facebook then takes the necessary action to block such posts. If it is found that a particular user’s messages are repeatedly inappropriate, that user can be blocked from the site altogether. However, this particular post did not fall into that category.

On enquiry it was found that it was not so much the blocking of the comment, but the wording of the message that created confusion. Facebook has clarified that the comment was blocked due to some features in their algorithm, which is used to block spammers. They are in the process of trying to find out what exactly in the controversial comment caused the spam blocker to get triggered.

The official statement from Facebook on this issue is, “To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.”

The tool, called the Personal Blocklist extension, can be downloaded directly from the Chrome Web Store.

Once users download the extension for their Chrome browser, they can decide which sites they want to block from the search results pages they view and can communicate these decisions to Google.

Thus, if a user finds that that the results obtained from a particular site are not up to the mark in terms of quality, or they have just been copied from another site, the user can click on a link added by the extension to block that site from appearing in future search engine results pages.

Blocking sites from SERPs using the Chrome Personal Blocklist extension

When a site is blocked, a signal will automatically be sent to Google regarding this. Google will then study the feedback received in this manner. If they find that certain sites are being blocked repeatedly by individuals, they could eventually decide to block the site from their search results entirely.

A user who blocks some sites will be able to check the list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension icon on the top right hand of the Chrome window. The user can also unblock a blocked site if he wishes to.

This extension is an effort by Google to help reduce spam in their search results. It is specifically aimed at content farms, which are sites that host lots of content that is merely duplicated from other sites or is not of much value in and of itself.

The extension is still in the testing stage and is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Doomed For SEO / Spam Misuse

In the past, Google has tried to enable users to indicate which websites were good and which ones were bad in the search results. They did this through Google SideWiki and search results customisations. However, the endeavour was mostly used by SEO specialists and spammers. This new tool is more than likely to meet the same fate.

So, unless Google has figured out a really good way to crowd-source policing of the SERPs without opening themselves up to competitive malpractice, the new extension is likely to fail too.

Mixx has launched a new site, called TweetMixx, which aims to help users to sort and categorise all types of content, including stories, videos and photos, thus making it easy for users to decide which tweets they want to see and which ones they would likely skip, thus saving valuable time.

Now that almost everybody from VIPs to celebrities and the guy next door are joining Twitter, the site is getting pretty crowded with tweets. Following many people and finding interesting users can be extremely confusing, since tweets are not tagged. It is difficult and very time consuming for users to determine which of the tweets they will find relevant and significant.

The new service from Mixx will allow users to easily find the content that they are interested in, instead of having to sort through thousands of tweets. Users type in keywords they are interested in and TweetMixx provides the most relevant recent tweets.

TweetMixx also provides a shortcut to just the links tweeted by a user’s friends, ignoring all the “pointless babble“.

Shortened URLs are also automatically unpacked and presented as useful links with explanatory titles and descriptions, which can be very handy when trying to decide whether clicking on a link such as http://bit.ly/xpp5L.

Users can send tweets, save pages and check incoming links from their friends on a single dashboard page instead of having to jump from one page to another. When a user receives new tweets, a message at the top of the TweetMixx page says so. To use TweetMixx, users can log in to their Twitter account through OAuth.

While the benefits of TweetMixx for Twitter users have been discussed at length on the service announcement on the Mixx Blog, almost nothing has been said about how the service integrates with Mixx.

TweetMixx Spams Mixx

A bot called TwitterSubmitter on Mixx automatically adds all tweeted stories that get pulled by TweetMixx onto Mixx. When these tweets are listed with further information regarding the links, TweetMixx also provides a count of the number of times the same link has been retweeted and a link saying “Details on Mixx”.

Clicking on the details link brings users to a page on Mixx that shows the very same article, as if a real user had submitted it. However, since the link has actually been submitted by a bot, it hardly ever gets any votes and ends up languishing like spam on the site.

Mixx obviously has the right intentions in mind. They should have thought of a better way to integrate the service and provide more informative content on Mixx, rather than just spamming their own site with every inane tweet possible!

TweetMixx enabling spam on Mixx

The above mentioned statement is only applicable to those online marketers who use the names or photographs of celebrities, to endorse their products without having taken the consent of the celebrities concerned.

While this has been a very common practice for a long time now, talk show host Oprah Winfrey has decided not to take this practise lying down anymore.

Mashable reports that Oprah, along with Dr. Mehmet Oz and The Illinois Attorney General’s office, has filed a lawsuit against over 50 marketers for using her name to promote their products without her consent.

The lawsuit filed by Attorney General Lisa Madigan, charges 3 suppliers and a local affiliate marketer of acai berry products, for misleading consumers, by offering free trials and then charging them through their credit cards, even before the trial product reaches them. The scammers also makes it very difficult to cancel the order or to stop payment.

The suppliers named in a press release by the Illinois Attorney General are Advanced Wellness Research, its successor Netalab and its former President Nicholas Molina, Crush LLC and its owner TMP Nevada Inc and Amirouche and Norton LLC and Larby Amirouche.

Reuters reports that a lawsuit has also been filed in New York for copyright and trademark infringement against about 50 companies for misusing names, pictures, voices or trademarks and leading consumers to believe that their products have been tested and recommended by Oprah and Dr. Oz, which is not the case at all.

Following the filing of the lawsuit, an online affiliate ad network Azoogle, sent an email to its members, warning them about the possible consequences of using celebrity names without permission.

These lawsuits might have the desired effect, in the short run, but unscrupulous marketers will always find ways to exploit the law unless more celebrities decide to take action against such marketers and bring more of them to justice for brand abuse.

Over the past few months a number of celebrities including Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Barack Obama, to name only a few, and mainstream media companies such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times and many others have joined Twitter and are trying to out-do each other by collecting the most followers.

A few months ago, Stephen Fry and Barack Obama’s PR team led the most popular Twitter accounts, with a couple of hundred thousand followers each. Until yesterday, no single user account on Twitter had crossed the magical figure of one million followers.

The three hottest contenders for the million-follower mark were Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Britney Spears. The race actually started off when Ashton Kutcher announced, through a video, that he intended to beat the popular news channel CNN and be the first to have one million followers on Twitter.

Kutcher had started out on Twitter in a very modest way, but later he was joined by his equally famous wife Demi Moore and that really helped to generate a huge fan following. He also posted photographs of her bending down in her underwear on popular Twitter photo-sharing site, Twitpic, which brought a lot of public attention to his Twitter account.

Ashton has now succeeded in being the first to have a million followers on Twitter, and to celebrate his victory he has announced that he will donate $100,000 to the ‘Malaria No More’ fund, to help fight the rampantly prevalent disease in Africa.

While this gesture is definitely commendable, it seems quite silly that celebrities and the media are trying to beat each other at this game of winning more and more followers on the network. Other celebrities and media publications will reach that target soon enough, and each of them will probably make it sound like they have created history.

Twitter does not seem to mind. In fact, they were reported to have created a special position in the company to cater to their celebrity users.

This obsession with celebrities could destroy the original essence of the site, which had been started by a group of computer geeks, to keep in touch with each other.

Today, Oprah Winfrey posted her first tweet ever, and she already has 100,000 followers, more than double what the most popular geeks acheived after 3 years of using the service! Ellen DeGeneres posted her first Tweet only last month, and is already close to having a million followers.

With Twitter quickly turning into the average person’s hotline to the stars, the number of spam accounts is bound to rise. If the company does not handle its growth and the growth of associated spam on the service appropriately, the original users that helped bring up the service could leave and find greener social media pastures very quickly.

Ever since Facebook opened its social networking site to third party developers interested in building applications for it in May 2007, they have been battling deceitful and abusive practices. The main irritants are self promotion features in applications such as bulk unsolicited emails and intrusive message displays.

Facebook has gained immense popularity as a platform for sharing content through the social graph / news feed. They have gradually opened up the limits on notifications, requests and email communication.

However as with all new technologies there are those who choose to abuse the system for their own benefit, in this case by sending notifications to users for an application that the user has not installed via another application installed on the user account.

Other application developers have deceive users by putting links in the Facebook news feed, notifications and notification emails that lead to the installation of a different application in a similar way, thereby tricking users into installing an application that they did not intend to.

In the New Year Facebook has made a “resolution” to block all such abusive practices. This of course is not a foolproof system, as friends can still send silly invites to each other. The safeguards will however reduce the amount of spam, and hence will win Facebook back some points with the privacy police, points that they had recently lost due to their over-ambitious Beacon advertising program.

According to Nick O Neil at AllFacebook.com, “Facebook has imposed a number of restrictions and has slowly clamped down on spammy activities available to application developers. The new announcement by Facebook underlines their continuing dedication to battle spam both within applications and elsewhere on their site.”