Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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David Heath
Friday, 20 November 2009 16:16
Today, iTWire received a press release, the title says it all. “FACEBOOK THROWS LAWYERS AT FAN SELLER.”
The rush-of-ego continues (allow me to quote the entire press release):
“After recently winning a landmark $711 million in a recent spam lawsuit, Facebook has now thrown the might of their lawyers at someone else who they claim is illegally making use of their site.
“They have just sent a cease and desist notice to uSocial.net, a company who sells fans and until recently friends on the social media site.
“We have been dealing with Facebook regarding this matter and we have removed our friend-buying service, though we’re not budging on selling fans.” Said uSocial CEO Leon Hill. “We are well within our legal right to do so and despite the C&D, we’re not taking the service down.”
“In the letter, Facebook claim uSocial is breaking several laws, including illegally accessing the site.”
“This is the second such notice the site has received from a social media site, after receiving one from Digg in 2008."
"We’re actually not too worried by this and we’ll be ramping up our Facebook services in the coming weeks," said Hill. "We’ll shortly be launching a similar service with Facebook groups, though we will have to wait and see what the response is from that."
uSocial has been the subject of numerous iTWire articles, none of which have been particularly 'positive.' One can hardly imagine that the outcome of the latest contre temps will be anything but mortal to Leon Hill, uSocial CEO (and the entirety of the team? One wonders).
There is something very odd about the process of SELLING connections in the social media world - surely the whole point of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and their ilk is to encourage people to form their own connections. After-all, what is the point of friends being bought-and-sold?
Personally, I’d much prefer that the people who followed me (be it on Facebook, Twitter or whatever) were actually interested enough to make the decision to connect with me without the exhortations of Mr Hill.
But that’s just my personal opinion; who am I to criticise uSocial’s business model. However, it is refreshing to observe that Facebook shares these opinions, and has the legal cojones to press the point.
As an aside, a poster to one of the previous stories echoed the negative tone only in the moments prior to this article being published.
Let battle commence.
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