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Comment by ahsanhilal | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect to the socialcam team, I also think their viral growth is due to some underhanded techniques that they are using by posting, without user content, on news feeds.

Here is my post on HN regarding this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3917074

Basically if you click on a social cam video on facebook, which takes you to social cams webapp to view the video, the video also gets added and shared to your newsfeed without user consent

I really really do not like apps using underhanded techniques to go forth with their viral agendas. If I really wanted to share this video, than I WOULD HAVE. That is what a like/share is, isn't it?

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This is especially frustrating with Socialcam since when I first linked my fb account (on the android app) it said "We won't spam your wall. Promise."

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/HPnGn.png

Every time I see a socialcam link on Facebook, I'm very careful not to click it for precisely the reason you mentioned above.

Congrats to them on their growth, but all this time I was under the impression that it was a spammy operation, so no kudos.

it seems like a lot of Facebook users thinks Socialcam is a spam.

https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2154928

so whats the fine line here? they clearly say they won't spam your wall, yet they post without you knowing and you can't even see yourself that you posted something?

I really hate it when tools use such underhanded techniques, but I get it from a business point of view.

Especially social apps like SocialCam need to become the biggest network in their space to succeed in the end. Being number two in the social space is a far worse than in any other market because of network effects.

It's probably worth offending some users and even loosing some. Especially posting it on your wall, when you click on it, is something that most users don't care about. I've asked some of my not so tech-savy friends and they think it's totally okay.

Something that doesn't work at all is posting something without any action from the user or from a different source than their facebook timeline (for example from an mobile app) without their consent. This can kill your product and will upset nearly everybody.

But that is exactly what they are doing. All I did was click on the video posted, and that immediately posted on my feed, and people started commenting on it. No approval solicited.

Didn't Facebook recently warn apps from doing this? I thought chill (the turntable for video) got a slap on the wrist for doing something similar

The distinction, as I understand it, is the "voice" the app uses. Chill said something like "Hey I just joined Chill and it's pretty cool, you should check it out!" First person. Socialcam says "John Doe has watched Rick Roll Video." Third person.

Thats BS. It is malicious spam. There used to be vids that would pop up on walls and when you clicked them it would do the SAME thing as socialcam. Those were spam because they posted to you wall "girl on rollercoster has orgasm" or something stupid so that others would click and it would spread. Now "viral" has no meaning because it is forced upon the people. What if i thought the vid i watch premoted sexism and DID NOT want others to watch it? Well to bad, now even bad vids well go viral all you need is enough friends who have enough friend. Soon i wont even be able to use facebook for what it is good for, keeping in touch, and viewing the feeds that i have chosen to appear

I mark them as spam whenever I see their stuff posted on facebook. They might not consider it spam, but it pretty clearly meets the definition in my mind. It's unsolicited, and masquerading as an action taken by one of my friends. Total bs.

Rarely does a team create something with negative value but social cam has succeeded! Their app pollutes my wall. I hope their team reads this because they have designed the worst program I have seen on Facebook.

Even worse thing they are doing is lying to all my friends.

Use case(happend to me on May 4th):

1) I watched some video on YouTube.com. Yes, just on youtube, not even on their site or app, althoug SC had access to my fb at by that time. 2) I liked that video and shared it on my FB stream from YouTube page 3) Since socialcam had access to my stream and they somehow monitored it and within a minutes posted another update to my wall:

Vladimir Gurgov watched a video on Socialcam Video recorded with Socialcam on April 19, 2012 Release Date: Friday, May 4, 2012 at 12:53pm

This video was NOT watched on Socialcam and was NOT recorded with Socialcam. Its YT video that i watched on YouTube.com. To me its clear lying or misleading all of my fb friends. With all the respect to fellows at Socialcam I am questioning such marketing tactics etiquette. I am wondering what HN community think of it?

sounds about right from what i've seen. as one of the people that built Zynga, i'd like to congratulate the team on getting 'agressive'. maybe you guys can turn it into a quiz app or something really cool ;)

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