Ok, I know that it SEEMS like I have been slacking these past few months since I arrived in Southern California, but really, the wonderful, consistent weather hasn’t distracted me a bit. Seriously though, getting settled over the past 3 months while returning to the east coast a handful of times was a busy time for me. I’m ready to get back to blogging about my experiences in interactive marketing.

The thing that triggered this blog post was a sneaky little move that I discovered Myspace had made in an effort to further discourage abuse of their messaging platforms. Over the past few months, they have been battling with spammers by implementing stricter CAPTCHA strategies, imposing daily communication limits and attempting to control outgoing links posted in messages. After getting to the point of banning active links within private messages*, spammers still seemed to continue their quest for free ipod giveaway registrants, strong as ever.

As I got an myspace message back from a friend, telling me that the site I sent him a link to was down, I noticed something interesting. The domain that I referred to in the message body was inthebrick.com, but the message was reformatted automatically and the domain was stated as inthebrick..com to my friend. This was obviously the cause of his inability to get to the site that I sent him to, since he cut-and-pasted the domain directly out of the message. I played around with it a bit and there is no way to create a message that the recipient can simply cut-and-paste the URL, so I was forced to do the “I feel like I am doing something wrong but I am not…am I?” - inthebrick com. Will it be effective? I don’t know; but I do know that it is an inconvienence to the regular users that just want to tell their freinds about other sites on the interweb.

*not allowing active links greatly decreases the chances of a user typing in a full URL string (www.domain.com/uniqueID) and therefore hurt affiliates/referral partners who are in some cases where spamming on behalf of other sites in echange for per-sale or per-lead basis. From what I saw most savvy affiliate spammers proceeded to register domains (www.freeipod.com) and redirect them to their own affiliate links (which actually gives them the ablility to change the affilite partner/offer on the fly while campaigns are still live. In fact, they could even split test offers by randomizing the affiliate URL that the domain pointed to….ok, I’m done with this thought…lol…)