March 2012 – Media Culpa

Fake IKEA gift cards – Spam hits Pinterest

The popular online pinboard Pinterest has been hit by a series of spam ads. Pinterest user Craig Fifield found that a strange image had been posted on of of his wife’s boards. It was something she would never pin on the site, an ad for Wal-Mart. The same thing was noticed by Om Malik on Gigaom:

“Earlier this evening, some kind of spam-exploit injected javascript code that started replacing many Pinterest photos with ads for Best Buy. (see photo.) The actions resulted in disgruntled users blaming Pinterest.”

Fake gift cards for well known brands such as Wal-Mart, IKEA, iPad and others are suddenly all over Pinterest.

They all seem to be pointing to the site facebook-goodies.com and some spammer has probably posted several photos and then after they were repinned, the image changed to an ad through some kind of script. The original images seem to have been posted to boards themed “party ideas”, “beauty” and “quotes” to name a few.

Some of the spam ads have been repinned more than 6,000 times.

This is of course quite serious for Pinterest, since it is a blow to the very heart of the site. If we can no longer trust that images we repin aren’t going to turn into spam ads, dare we use the site at all?

Another form of spam that has been emerging is that the same image is posted multiple times on multiple accounts, but with the exact same text.

Update: one of the accounts that seemed to be the origin of some spam ads have now been deleted: http://pinterest.com/ElisabethCarla/

Infographic: H&M vs Spotify on Twitter

H&M is the Swedish brand with most followers on Twitter. But Spotify, which is the second largest brand, creates more engagement around each tweet.

Here is an infographic that illustrates the battle for the top spot among Swedish brands on Twitter. Created with visual.ly.

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Instagram has changed the way it gives ID numbers to photos

In January I published a blog post about the growth of Instagram. I hade noticed that the unique ID numbers for photos on Instagram were handed out in a serial sequence. In other words, it wasn’t very hard to calculate the growth of the service since the data was publicly available. All you had to do was a bit of digging. For example, here is photo number 400 million: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/400000000_3849764

Update: the links to Statigram no longer work

A few weeks later, on Feb 7 to be precise, Instagram changed the ID numbers from serial sequence to what looks like a random set of numbers. As of this date, the ID numbers are determined with what I believe is called a hash function (please correct me if I got this wrong). It is no longer possible to determine the volume of uploads to Instagram by simply looking at the ID numbers.

So how do I know this changed on Feb 7? Take a look at the Instagram user “boobievsjagger“. On that day, he posted this photo:

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/686008000_10844406

According to the first part of the unique ID, this is photo number 686,008,000. The second part of that string is the ID for that user.

Later that day he published another photo:

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/120983929741434582_10844406

The first part of the ID is now replaced with 18 digits that gives us no clue to what number among the uploads this photo has. The same goes for all other images posted after Feb 7.

I predicted in my January post that Instagram would reach 1 billion uploaded photos by April this year. If you ask me, I think Instagram changed the way each photo is identified after my blog post, which was also picked up by The Next Web, among others. So now we can’t tell how fast Instagram is growing, until the company decides to tell us themselves. Let’s wait and see.

A related question is if the ID numbers for members on Instagram also will change. As it looks now, you can tell that Instagram has at least 27 million users. Here is a friend of mine that just joined: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/user/27135093/

Barack Obama’s profile on Pinterest hijacked again

After a bit of confusion this week, I finally understood what had happened to Barack Obama’s profile page on Pinterest. It seemed as if the account had pinned several “non-presidential” images to a board, but in reality a user had taken advantage of a security flaw in Pinterest. When you invite another user to collaborate on a board, that board becomes visible on that user’s profile too. So an inactive account like Obama’s could be “hijacked” to include any board without the account owner even noticing it.

After that first incident, the person who managed the board that appeared on Obama’s page, removed it. But now it has happened again. Another board is visible on pinterest.com/barackobama and once again it does not belong to that account.

Having the President look like a fool on your site, can’t be good for business. Pinterest should change the procedure so that a user that has been invited to collaborate on a board actively has to agree that the board becomes visible on its profile.

Barack Obama brandjacked on Pinterest – updated

[Updated – see end of the post] Yesterday Mashable noted that Barack Obama had joined yet another social network, namely the much hyped Pinterest. At that point, the account had no boards. I must admit that I thought that it was an official account for the Obama/Biden campaign. I couldn’t for the life of me think that the campaign people and/or Pinterest would allow someone to snatch the username “barackobama” from the US President. But it seems both Mashable and I were wrong.

The Pinterest account has now posted one board, but it does not at all look like the kind of content you thought would be pinned by Obama. In fact, when you hold the cursor over the board you will notice that the link points to a board by another user: http://pinterest.com/mikestreet/bropin/ This board has some 440 pins, including some images that are NSFW.

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I don’t know how this is done technically. When I look at my own Pinterest profile I only see boards that are my own. But “mikestreet” has the very same board with the same images on his profile, so clearly this must be a fake Obama account. What do you think? Could there be another explanation?

Update: I emailed with Lauren Orsini who gave a reasonable explanation to what happened. The account is probably not fake at all, but the board seen above in my screen shot was put there as a joke by Mike Street. You see, there is a way to add other Pinterest users as collaborators to your boards and when you do, that board will appear on their profile too. This can be used with great effect if you are doing it to an inactive account, like a celebrity for example, they will not notice they have been added. So the Obama account was not paying attention that Mike added it as collaborator, making us believe that Obama had created a board named #BroPin. Lauren has written about that security flaw here – How to hijack popular brands on Pinterest for free publicity.

Although I don’t recommend that you do this on Pinterest, I must admit I was fooled. Well played!