The industry is definitely making big changes to self regulate around social gaming offer scams (complete background here, with updates). Zynga, the largest social gaming company and the worst offender when it comes to scams, said yesterday that they will take steps to remove scams from games. They were quickly followed by RockYou.
Today MySpace is making a big move itself. They are instituting a “zero tolerance for app scams” policy, says CEO Owen Van Natta, and are amending their apps developer terms of use to further restrict the types of offers than can be presented to users.
The existing terms of use already prohibit many types of scams and require clear and accurate descriptions of offers. But as we’ve shown in previous posts, sometimes a clear and accurate description hidden at the bottom of a page in 8 point type isn’t all that useful.
The addition MySpace is adding a requirement to have users opt in to any specific offer or promotion that includes a renewal or subscription.
Today, we’re adding a fifth principle that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted. Because it’s our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers.
Rules are great, but without enforcement the scammy offers never go away (this is the Facebook problem). MySpace says they will enforce these rules and will remove applications that don’t modify practices promptly:
Principles and policies are nothing without action and we will continue to enforce our Terms of Use to put our users first. If we find or are notified of violations of our Terms of Use we will contact the application developer and require that they modify their practices and adhere to our Terms. If we do not receive a prompt and appropriate response we will, as we have in the past, remove the offending application from the MySpace platform.
The proof is in the pudding, of course. But this is yet another big company stepping up to try to put a stop to social gaming application scams. It’s time for Facebook to make their move.
Here’s the full blog post:
MySpace’s Zero Tolerance Policy for App Scams
There has been increased discussion recently about how some application developers on the Web’s major social platforms are misleading consumers with deceptive practices. It’s important that users and developers clearly understand MySpace’s policies and approach to these activities.
The MySpace Apps Terms of Use clearly state that we prohibit any deceptive, misleading, and unfair activity through developer applications on MySpace. The Terms of Use require developers to provide accurate information to users and comply with specific rules around what information is being collected, payment terms, and promotional offers. They also prohibit spam and other malicious use.
Our Terms of Use were drafted with the following four principles in mind:
1. All MySpace users are entitled to a safe, scam-free application experience.
2. All offers to MySpace users must have a clear and accurate description which is not misleading or deceptive to users.
3. All offers to MySpace users must have a clear and conspicuous explanation of cost with no hidden fees.
4. No application is permitted to incentivize a user to provide their personal information in exchange for virtual goods or currency within the application.
Today, we’re adding a fifth principle that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted.
Because it’s our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers.
Principles and policies are nothing without action and we will continue to enforce our Terms of Use to put our users first. If we find or are notified of violations of our Terms of Use we will contact the application developer and require that they modify their practices and adhere to our Terms. If we do not receive a prompt and appropriate response we will, as we have in the past, remove the offending application from the MySpace platform.
Developers are our partners and we want to continue our collaborative and meaningful relationship with the development community. Having recently acquired iLike we have access to some of the most successful social application developers with a wealth of knowledge to inform us how we can have a smarter, more thoughtful application strategy.
If you have any questions about these policies or principles please reach out to our Partner Relations team at partnerrelations@myspace-inc.com.
We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve received from our users and developers and look forward to more great things to come for the MySpace Application Platform.
-Owen
Way to go Arrington!! I loved the YouTube video of you @ the gaming conference.
I don’t believe anything eUniverse/MySpace says when it comes to trust and privacy.
oh wow. playing the euniverse card. that’s low.
Internet never forgets.
lol touche and so true.
Ok, so now apart from Offerpal, everyone else has swum to this other side..
Shame on you, Anu..
No mike i disagree…after all isn’t myspace now part of news corp…they will do anything to win over a user base….no that’s not low….myspace also needs to clean itself up that why it lost to the likes of facebook in the first place.
Go. Go. Go. Michael
so I guess now that facebook, myspace, zynga, and rockyou have all confessed saying they were wrong that maybe @loopj over at Heyzap has a different take on it now? can we get a follow up on that?
With great power comes great responsibility.
All of this change due to the first Scamville post?
Mike’s blogging power power has no bounds.
I wonder how much of Zynga’s success story was built on ripping people off? Not just end-users of course, but advertisers who get junk data from these scams (and often can’t check the source of their data accurately, just that it’s “from Facebook”). It’s just robbery and doesn’t help either end-user or advertiser.
So it will be interesting to now see how Zynga does and how much of its success was down to these scams.
Great work Mike.
watch the year-end revenue numbers drop.
tell that to kpcb who put $29 into zynga…
http://paidcont...-buys-fbook-ap/
Kleiner partner John Doerr told WSJ that this funding was “special and surprising” in part because the fund likes to invest at an earlier stage. But he was drawn to the fact that Zynga had “cracked the code” on how to develop engaging and viral games fast, the story says, which seems a bit too early to say about a company that just launched in January this year.
That’s how much power Techcrunch now has.
Props for puting it to good use.
It’s indeed a great success, but the big hypocrisy of it all is that the same IQ test and other “when will you die?” scams that trick users into subscribing to mobile services are a huge part of the ad inventory of many sites, MySpace included.
Yes, as ads, users are not enticed to click on them so that they can keep playing, but they are exactly the same scams, simply running as bottom of the barrel ads
that is not hypocrisy, that is called ‘coming up next on Techcrunch’
I hope so.
And after that, how about Google Adsense ads disguised as content? I’m talking about those sites that somehow get to break away from the standard text formatting of Google Adsense ads and can tailor the formatting of the ads to look exactly like content. e.g. daniweb.com/forums/thread235479.html – yes they have “Ads by Google” but the formatting blinds you to this text (looks like a username).
Anyway, good to see scams being exposed.
I must say that I am thoroughly impressed. Primarily with Michael Arrington blowing this wide open. I don’t really care what his reasoning was. Whether it was a personal vendetta or just the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter at this point. It needed done. Bravo.
I’m also impressed, though to a lesser degree, with all the companies coming out of the woodwork and jumping on the bandwagon heading towards righteousness. It’s sad it took this for that to happen, but again it needed done.
However, I’ll be even more amazed…no, completely floored…when we actually start hearing about apps and advertiser being banned for not falling in line. They’ve had one strike, I don’t think they deserve 3. I say give them a deadline and if it’s not met, don’t negotiate. Out they go!
Mike just knows how to time things; the talk of VGS before he went on his tirade was how Facebook was planning on cracking down Sunday night.
All of the offer companies, etc were already scrubbing for the new enforcement action.
yeah agree. i must say that in the virtual goods summit video anu from offerpal looks and sounds really ridiculous, especially in the wake of the changes that had happened since. she should have just said : “you’re right michael. it’s been a problem, and we are / will be doing something about it” and then followed up with action – maybe better vetting their inventory, etc etc. short term loss for long term viability.
to be fair it is easier for the customers of offerpal to take a stance since they have multiple revenue streams (including direct virtual good payments).
But I heard a lot of people clapping after her ’shit’ thingy..now the same people have hopped to the other side..
Yeah she was horribly obnoxious, swearing directly at Mike, and getting laughs just because of her “chutzpah” – really low behaviour and she should be embarrassed after watching the video. She was clearly very angry that Mike simply pointed to the elephant in the room (in more ways than one!).
+10000
I enjoy that Facebook sometimes doesn’t respond to the blogosphere solely and does its own thing
lolwut
They’re independent and free minded people who just want to chill whilst making the world more cool and connected.
I agree totally
Way to go Mike!
Glad to see these mobile offers disappear for good.
Can all sites shorten the Terms & Conditions without compromising the objectives.
It’s quite tedious to read the whole thing at times.
In an related news, Myspace has gone bankrupt, haha! Page 6 has the scoop on dumb gossip and Fox has purchased Perez Hilton
Mike, I think you need to take on the wireless carriers next. I’m in the mobile space, but I don’t have numbers on the % of premium SMS revenue that comes from offers like these. Would love to know… maybe time to make it a personal mission.
Whats myspace?
Can @arrington go on a tirade against hunger or global warming next? Impressive how much shit (and double-shit) he is making happen!
MySpace is turning into MySpam…almost everything in my inbox is spam… I used to like the site, now I hate it…spam spam spam…there needs to be a way to add a captcha to regular mails in there…
Up until the evening of Oct 30, there was porn on Rock You (on Facebook)… if you went to Rock You, clicked “received”, then “select all”, there was lots of explicit porn, supposedly sent by your friends (name and profile pic of the friend who “sent” it was included). I know these friends did NOT send me any porn, just as I know that I didn’t send porn to them, even though their Rock You contained porn supposedly sent by me. Finding porn on your profile was bad enough, but what was worse was the fact that the posts were attributed to people who never sent them. It was still there on the afternoon of Oct 30, but had disappeared by the evening. A quick snoop in the Developers’ app showed that there have been complaints (which were reported to Facebook)from several developers about Rock You porn for at least two years.
On Nov 2 there wass a site-wide phishing attack on MySpace. You were automatically redirected to a false Facebook app called “chance of catching Swine flu” (apparently “when will you die” and “IQ test” were also used, though less often). It was not possible to exit when you (sensibly) didn’t click on it.
I think it must have installed a cookie (although nothing was found on an AVG scan I did immediately) because when I went to Facebook, “chance of catching Swine flu” was magically on my list of recently-added apps. It seems that this happened only to people who had been on MySpace Nov 2. The MySpace forum thread about this rapidly stretched to 17 pages (206 posts from all over the world).
It was fixed on MySpace several hours later, but when I type “fl” in the search box in Facebook, it still shows “chance of catching Swine flu” as well as the Flash Forward group I’m looking for, even though I “X”‘ed it from my app list.
I LOVE FARMVILLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We’re running a new survey for our users on the social gaming offers experience and the general user experience with payment methods in social gaming.
We invite users to submit questions they would like to see posed to the community in our next survey:
http://peanutla...er-controversy/