Too Much, Too Soon?

There's a lot of new social networking sites out there nowadays, with new ones popping up all the time. Not so long ago, Zubby.com was launched with the following message from founder Randy Zlobec:

"Although it's obviously a great success, I think the problem with MySpace is the amount of advertising it has given itself over to," Zlobec states when asked why he started Zubby.com. "Many of my friends have a MySpace account and the one thing we all agree on is the frustration of logging on to find out you have 30 new messages from people you don't know, trying to sell you a magic pill or similar! Also, there are all the adverts that take up all your page space, not to mention the amount of times accounts have been hacked. With Zubby, we aim to change all that and more."

As I was one of the first people to register there, I've seen emails get fired out regarding what's going on in the network, and it seems that as time goes by, Zubby has to sadly face facts - eventually, all the problems that plagued someone else come and plague you, too.

Here's a mail from the 27th of November:

....a simple warning about placement of adverts. And then, a few days later, another message entitled "First member banned from Zubby.com":

...does this sound like a miniaturized version of Myspace yet? Then, on the Second of December, we have a mini spam invasion on the network:

....it doesn't take long for the bad guys to start exploiting the system, does it? Eventually, it really is a case of too much, too soon and on the 11th of December, they haven't anticipated exactly how many people were going to register on the site:

Whoops.

I'm already starting to sink in an Ocean of "30 messages from people I don't know", and friend invites from people called "Cash" and "UProfit" who have profiles like this:

....with not a lot else on them but gigantic pictures of cheques and endless promises regarding how much money you're going to make.

It seems the sad reality is that for anyone running a social networking site, any and all attempts to avoid incidents such as the above are totally, and utterly, doomed to failure. Am I being too negative here? Or is that a fair assessment of these sites?