Facebook long history
Chain letters -- which date back to the days of snail mail -- have dogged nearly every online service that achieved critical mass. While they vary in the details, the general premise is that something negative will happen to your account unless you spread the message to your friends.
On AIM, this took the form of IMs that needed to be shared with friends to avoid account deletion. On Friendster, rumors spread that the service was getting "too crowded" -- and hence, they needed to determine which accounts were active and remove those that weren't. On MySpace, word was that the service was getting so popular that the site would soon start charging members, and the only way to avoid the fees was to -- you guessed it -- forward the message to your friends.
Of course, none of these situations ever actually materialized, but it didn't stop millions of users from passing the message along. Snopes has a detailed overview of these scams and others that have permeated the web over the years, going all the way back to the early days of Hotmail.
0 comments:
Post a Comment