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SCOTT SIMON, host:
Couple of weeks ago, we interviewed tech blogger Dean Takahashiabout the wildly popular Facebook game Farmville. But the vastlandscape of some 63 million players attending to their virtual fieldsmay not be as bucolic as it seems. Farmville and other apps like those catchy quizzes on Facebook often leave the barn
door wide open to spammers. Dennis Yu ought to know. He used to be oneof those spammers. He's the CEO of the ad agency BlitzLocal, andrecently wrote a guest posting on TechCrunch called How to SpamFacebook Like a Pro: An Insider's Confession. Mr. Hu joins us now fromDallas. Thanks very much for being with us。
Mr. DENNIS YU (CEO, BlitzLocal)： Good morning, Scott。
SIMON: So what happens when you - and we'll use Farmville as an example - but how does that throw open the door?
Mr. YU: When the Facebook platform opened in June of 07, itallowed developers to build applications that sit on top of theFacebook platform to use user data. When a user clicks Accept, thatthey want to join, most of their profile information is now available.That can be used to create a very intense, addictive game, but it canalso be used to advertising, and when you can use that data inside anad to inject a user's name, their profile picture, the information oftheir friends, it creates highly relevant, highly targeted advertising,very smart ads. We can call them appvertising,for example. And may be they know your birth day and they can say, heyScott, Happy Birthday, we'd like to show you - here's a three slice ofcake. You can do very relevant social advertising when you know aboutwho they are。
The trouble becomes when advertisers who are bad players in themarket, now that this new information is available, will use it indeceptive ways. And Facebook has, on a number of occasions, crackeddown on these bad players, to be able to say you cannot inject userinformation into the ads. So that's not being done anymore.Unfortunately, it's very difficult to try to stay one step ahead. It'sa game of Whack-A-Mole, where you close down these holes and otherpeople find a way to go around it. And there are loopholes here andyou're constantly trying to enforce it. And that's what happenswhenever you open a new platform。
SIMON: Mr. Yu, why do you - why are you coming clean on this? Why are you feeling remorseful?
Mr. YU: When you do things that are deceptive, you can make a quick buck, but that never lasts. So independent of any sort of ethical
concerns, for the long term, actually doing things that aretrustworthy, where we're working closely with Facebook themselves, is asmart business plan。
SIMON: Anything people can do to kind of play defense?
Mr. YU: Obviously, caveat emptor.Don't put your cell phone number when they ask for it. Be very carefulif you are agreeing to put in your email address, right, because it'snot Facebook necessarily that's asking you for an email address. Andmake sure that that fan page that is asking you to friend it actuallyis that fan page. The same things that you see traditionally on theInternet, where they say, hey, you're winner number 99,999 or you'recomputer may be infected - of course, anything that claims to be toogood to be true, you should worry about that。
Or maybe you see a message from a friend because there are guys who have created spyware
that will come in and take over your computer, send messages to allyour friends. A couple of weeks ago, somebody sent me a message. It wasanother industry colleague in the local search space. And he said, I'mstuck in London. Can you wire me some money? My wallet got stolen fromme. And I thought, well, I barely know this guy, but man, he's animportant person, maybe I can do something to help. And later, when Icontacted this fellow, he said, oh no, I didn't contact you. And Irealized what had actually happened. So identity theft is happening inthe most interesting sort of ways. So you've got to be careful。
SIMON: In the meantime, your blog, dennis-yu.com, you say that you're still playing Farmville. How's your wheat field doing?
Mr. YU: I think I actually have some crops that have rotted on me。
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. YU: Playing Farmville is actually a lot of fun. I talkedto their head of business development a week ago and he said that overhalf the revenue comes from people who actually outright buy thecurrency. It's amazing because you have to tip your hat - I don't thinkthat the game developers are necessarily bad. They're just trying -they're going to do whatever to make money and they're trusting the adnetworks. They're not experts in the advertising business. They'reexperts of making games。
SIMON: Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, speaking with us from Dallas. Thanks so much。
Mr. YU: Thank you, Scott。
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