Having spent a lot of time on Facebook over the last few days I have noticed a growing number of appearances of Fan Check in my ‘Highlights’ section. I was intrigued to see what this was and why so many of my friends had been tagged.

Fan Check is a Facebook app that claims to be able to calculate your top fans by who has visited your profile. The app then creates an image with your top 20 friends in and tags them. This image then appears in the ‘Highlights’ section of friends you have in common to advertise the app.

It all sounds straightforward and like another vanity checking feature of Facebook. However, anyone who knows even the slightest thing about Facebook’s privacy policies will know that this app is seriously flawed. There is no way for a 3^rd party app such as Fan Check to know who has been looking at your profile. There would be a massive uproar if Facebook gave access to such data. So how do apps like Fan Check get the data? They simply compile a list of 20 of your friends.

The viral nature of such apps is huge, but what do the developers gain? Well there has been lots of speculation that the app is infact a virus. The virus supposedly acts by displaying the following message when you click on the app (located at apps.facebook.com/fancheck).

“FanCheck is adding new features and new capacity. This could take a few days.
Please become a fan, and we’ll send you an update when we’re back online”

The claim is that when you click to become a fan your Facebook account becomes ‘infected’. However, this is highly unlikely and nothing has been reported to security sites such as Symantic or McAffe. A Facebook app it’s self cannot do any damage to your computer (as long as you don’t click out from it to malware sites).

The second stage of the problem this is that spammers have jumped on the back of the fear and a vast number of malware sites. A Google search for “facebook fan check virus” will return a vast number of these malware sites.

The message is simple, if a Facebook app claims to be able tell you who has been viewing your profile is a scam and should be avoided. Also don’t search for “facebook fan check virus” and visit the results.

UPDATE: 09/09/09

The app has now been updated and the message has been changed to

“This application ranks your friends based on how often they interact with your Facebook wall. Interactions counted include wall posts, comments, likes, gifts and other public items posted to your wall. In accordance with the Facebook Privacy Policy, we do NOT count page views or private messages.”

The option to become a fan has also been removed

It was summer 2008 and I was getting ready to go backpacking around Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I wanted a way to keep friends and family up to date with where I was and what I was up to. After some searching I stumbled across Twitter. The proposition of a micro blogging environment where I could quickly post up to 160 characters a in a similar way to my Facebook status updates was really appealing. I created an account, setup the old Nokia handset I was taking with me in place of the iPhone and set off.

Whilst I enjoyed keeping people updated with what I was up to on my travels I really struggled to find a real use for this new technology in my life. Who really wants to know that I am having a cup of tea or just got back from Tesco? I persevered with it though and whilst I was at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference, London, October 2008, it suddenly clicked.

I was sat listening to Kevin Rose from digg and I started to glance round the room. What I saw was a large proportion of people tapping away like things possessed on a variety of devices from laptops to iPhones, to mobile phones. After glancing at peoples screens I could see that the majority of them were on Twitter. This playful yet boring way of telling people about what I was eating for tea had suddenly transformed into a meaningful way of me sharing and storing useful links and information on web services I was finding about. I immediately fired up my iPhone and joined the masses.

I came back to work and embarked on a quest to get everyone in the office using Twitter. After some explanation, cojuling and threatening over half of the office now Tweet on a fairly regular basis.

I would love to claim that the fact that UK traffic to Twitter (not including Twitter clients e.g. TweetDeck or TwitterBerry) has increased almost tenfold in the last year is because I had  converted the masses and gained thousands of followers, but sadly that’s not the case.  I think it is more to do with the celebrity factor. In the last few months there have been several ‘celebrities’ who have started using Twitter and really catapulted it into the media spotlight. These include Jonathan Ross (@wossy), Phillip Schofield (@schofe), Chris Moyles and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry). I am glad to say that I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and joined the some 130,000 that Stephen Fry now has. I have mixed feelings about this over exposure of Twitter. On the one hand it is exciting to see this service take off but I am sceptical against people’s use of it to tell the world that they are eating a HobNob.

Twitter is open to abuse and it is starting to creep in. Organisations are starting to use it as a really unsubtle way of marketing products and services. They are setting up Twitter accounts and bombarding them with propaganda about how wonderful they are. Surely no one will follow them? You would be surprised. The other annoyance is the people/organisations who constantly search for a specific set of keywords and then target those who Tweet about them. For instance I cannot mention the iPhone in a Tweet without being approached by someone wanting to follow me and tell me about their new product.

What does the future hold for Twitter? There is no revenue model for the service but that didn’t stop the likes of YouTube or Skype.

If you are interested in seeing what I am tweeting about then why not follow me. If you want to sell me something then please leave me in peace!

Skittles got the marketing community talking today when it re-launched it’s site. Was it a all-singing all-dancing interactive site with buckets of content and games? No, It was merely a framed version of their Facebook or YouTube page.

Have Skittles completely missed the point or have they made a very good and very brave marketing move?

Check it out for yourself