Foursquare is unique, because in addition to the social networking aspect, it’s also a game, the object of wich is to collect virtual badges and “mayorships” by checking-in to more and different types of places. Check into a dozen coffee shops in town, and maybe you get a “coffee snob” badge. Check in after 3am Sunday through Thursday and you get a “Out on a School Night” badge. Be the person with the most check-ins at your favourite cafe and you’ll become the “mayor” of it. As such, some businesses have even started giving deals – say, free coffee – to the reigning mayor, adding real-world incentives for virtual social activity which creates a fun and potentially viral marketing angle to the traditional loyalty punch-card scheme.

There’s just one little snag with the game: it’s easy to cheat. You don’t have to be a hacker to do it either, though some have gone that route. You simply check into places you’re not really at. Because your GPS is only so accurate, and because most “places” you’re inclined to go are indoors, the little GPS (or radio-assisted aGPS) chip in your phone can only determine your location to within a few dozen – or a few hundred - meters, depending on your device and conditions. This is good enough to give a ballpark estimate of your location for the purposes of finding out if any of your friends are nearby, but it’s not accurate enough to give a definitive location or to verify a check-in. So, if I’m sitting at a pub in the CBD, checking-in to Foursquare, the GPS can’t actually tell if I’m at the pub, the shop across the street, or the cafe a few doors down – so I may as well go and check into them all. If the cafe next door wants to offer free coffee to the reigning mayor of their shop, they might soon find that none of their best customers are able to snatch the title away from the punters who frequent the pub next door.

I’m guessing that the game mechanics were layered on top as a marketing angle, which is a clever way to increase the user base, and bring people into the system. Allowing cheating to become commonplace, however, leads to “data pollution,” as those who cheat aren’t adding any value to the community, thereby depleting the usefulness of the service as a whole.

As a human living in a civilised society, your first thought is probably to bring cheaters to justice. Create a police department – punish the offenders! But on the internet, that doesn’t work, because policing cannot adequately scale as the system grows. The people who run Foursquare will never be able to find and stop everyone who cheats, undo every fake check-in and delete every fake venue. So discouraging such behavior has to be built into the game.

This is where we can learn from economics. If another layer, let’s just call it “credibility,” were linked to your ability to gain rewards, you’d add a reason not to cheat, to balance out the reasons you’d want to cheat. Your economics professor would probably call it “introducing moral hazard.” But that doesn’t really matter, here’s how it’d work in something like Foursquare: Everyone starts with a normal, medium credibility which allows normal, medium privileges. You can add places, you can steal mayorships and you can check-in at a new place every five minutes or so. Abuse the system by making too many check-ins too quickly or by adding useless places and  you run the risk that another user will catch on and flag you. A single flag would not lead to serious consequences – it might only slow down your maximum check-in rate to 10 minutes, which most people don’t do anyway. But if you continued your campaign of abuse, you’re likely to run into more users, who would also notice that you’re checking in all around town, and flag you as well, increasing your minimum wait between check-ins to 30 minutes. Or several hours. Or maybe days.

The theory is that the more prolific you become as a cheater, and the more broadly and blatantly you cheat; the more users would take note and flag you. The distribution, breadth and credibility of the users you’re being flagged by might also influence your penalty. If you’re simply checking into the pub across the street from the one you’re really at,  no one may take notice – or care – but if you check into every pub in town you can bet that dozens of folks would pick up on it. Your credibility would also be tied to your ability to attain rewards, so the best stuff might only be available to those in good standing.

If a credibility layer is implemented, I think that it should be used positively as well. The system could be more useful by using these points in the background to rank and display tips. For example, if I take the advice of a friend to get the salmon, and I really like it, I can indicate that I took their advice, improving their status and giving their tip a higher ranking in the list of tips for that venue. Maybe tips would always be listed in order of their writer’s credibility. Not only could this model limit cheating, but it might encourage people to provide more helpful tips, limit trolling and create a more useful system – being the most credible Foursquarer in town would be something to aspire to.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare notes that there are a lot of fake check-ins, but that they haven’t put a lot of effort into the problem of tackling cheating systemically. He seems to favour approaches that more closely validate your checkin.

I feel the phenomenon is rooted in economics. Wherever you create incentives, people find ways to use the system in unintended ways to get them. Such a system must also have disincentives, things that people do not want, which limit your ability to gain the incentives, and thereby balance the system. In the real economy, big rewards bear big costs, and so would it be in a micro-economy like Foursquare. Lasting success can only be gained by adding genuine value to the community, which can only be earned as the player becomes more respected by their peers.

I understand that a lot of these social tools are more social experiments than anything, and that cheating on Foursquare is hardly breaking-news, but I find it fascinating that any time the concept of reward is introduced to a society, even if it’s a tiny one like on Foursquare, you invariably find economics and game theory at work.

Update: Foursquare launched a new version today, and I’ve updated the screen-grab from the new version.

First, let’s just take as a given that there are people who are willing to plan their day around ice cream. Second, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that there might be a small cultural divide between those of us who spend our days fanatically trying out all the new stuff on the internet, and those that spend their days making delicious treats for children – so allow me to introduce the two of you:

Twitter: Mr. Whippy is a purveyor of soft serve ice cream, who roams the streets of New Zealand in search of children (ok, adults) that like ice cream.

Mr. Whippy: Twitter is a website where you post short messages to anyone who is interested in following you. You put where you’re at, or what you’re doing, and anyone who is interested can be updated in real-time. Think of it as a sort of public text message that anyone can receive. You can post a message (called a “tweet”) by sending a text to the service, where it will be broadcast for everyone. So ideally, Mr. Whippy will post something like “I’ll be in North Hagley, near the rugby fields for the next few hours.” Moments later, I’ll look at my phone, see your “tweet” and ride several miles out of the way I was intending.

Ok, now that we’re sorted on the introductions, let’s get you set up:

First, go to Twitter.com and get signed up. Pick a cool name like “ChchWhippy” or something like that – something people can remember. Add a little photo of a cone or the truck to flash it up a bit.

Next, grab your mobile and text “Start” to 8987, a special number just for Twitter that works on Telecom and Vodafone. Twitter will reply with a series of prompts. Tell it the cool name you came up with in the fist step and your password and you’re done. Try it out by texting “Who loves Mr. Whippy!?” to 8987. Save that number to your phone so you can post to Twitter every time you move the truck.

That’s it. Tell your friends to follow you, put a sign with your Twitter name on the truck or just let word spread. Soon, all the Mr. Whippy fans who use Twitter will be following you, and when they need a Whippy fix, they’ll know where to go.

Advanced Option:
If you really want to get nerdy, you can get a fancy internet-enabled phone like an iPhone or Blackberry. With one of those you can download a third-party apps like “Tweetie 2,” “TweetDeck” or “UberTwitter” that will let you attach a photo or GPS coordinates to your tweet, so people don’t even need to know their way around town to find the truck.

If you do me this one little favor, I promise to start bringing cash on bike rides.

Most libraries offer Audiobooks on CD for checkout. Some charge a small rental fee, and you’re limited to what you find on the shelf, or what is within reach of the library’s lending network. Despite listening to plenty of Audiobooks, I’ve checked out exactly zero of them from the library. If you’ve lifted one off the shelf lately, you no doubt noticed the size and weight of the thing. If you’re planning to walkabout town listening to a tome like the unabridged audio version of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” be sure to bring a backpack so you’re prepared to carry the boxed set of fifteen full length CDs. Include in your load a discman and a quiver of batteries, and you’ll soon be toting around a few kilos. You’ll probably find the hard cover version to be more portable. This seems ridiculous when you consider that even a long book like Friedman’s can be represented by about 300MB of data, which would fit 10 times over on a memory card small enough to swallow.

I haven’t bought a CD in years, nor have I any idea where I might find my antique discman, so what I really want to do is get Audiobooks the same way I get podcasts and music: by downloading them from the web and syncing them onto my iPod or any device that plays MP3s. While podcasts are generally free, Audiobooks delivered digitally can be quite dear. I’ve used services like Audible.com, where you can download an Audiobook for between US$7 and US$27. Audible has a subscription scheme where you can buy credits at a discount, but if you really love to listen you can easily go through an Audiobook in a few days, leaving you to wait for your credits to arrive at the beginning of the month, or just leaving you to pay full price. The system works well, but your Audiobook habit can quickly become more expensive than Sky TV or your internet connection itself, especially when you consider that few people plan to listen to an Audiobook more than once.

That’s why I was very excited to learn that the Christchurch City Library now has an OverDrive Audiobook Collection. If you’re not familiar with the system, it’s pretty straightforward. You go to your library’s website, and click through to their OverDrive portal. There you can browse the collection and download what you like, sync to your iPod or MP3 player, or even burn it to the aforementioned mountain of CDs.

OverDrive Media Console on Windows

To get started you’ll need to download OverDrive Media Console. OverDrive uses a proprietary player, which is necessary to manage and enforce the lending period, as that kind of functionality isn’t built into any of the media players you may already have installed, such as Windows Media Player or iTunes. Once that’s ready, you can log into the catalogue with your library card and have a look through the available titles. If you see something you like, and it’s available, you can simply add it to your basket and click checkout, just as you would when buying anything online, except you’ll be asked to log in with your library card and pin. After checkout you’ll be prompted to download a file. This file is not actually your media, but a .odm file. Think of it as the ticket for your media files. Once downloaded, simply open this file with OverDrive Media Console, and the program will begin to download the Audiobook media. The media is broken into many parts, and you can begin listening as soon as the first part is downloaded. In most cases, you have a fortnight to listen to the title. When your time is expired, the title will be “returned” to the library, meaning it will be removed from your computer, whether you’re finished or not.

If your title is not available, you can place a hold on it, and you’ll be notified by email when the title becomes available. You’ll have a few days to check it out before it’s goes to the next person waiting on the list.

Publisher Restriction Key in OverDrive Catalogue

The system does have a few drawbacks. As a Windows Media Player-based solution, most titles are only available as Windows Media Audio (.wma) format files, which only playback on Windows PC’s. Those with Mac’s can use OverDrive’s new Media Console for Mac, but due to publishers’ restrictions, Mac users will have less titles to chose from. You can sync most of the .wma format files to a Windows Mobile-based phone, but not all titles are available to sync onto your iPod, and fewer are available to sync onto a non-iPod MP3 player or burned to a CD, which limits the usefulness for those of us that like to listen to an Audiobook for those long drives in the car. It should also be noted that if the catalogue indicates that the title is available for iPod, but not for Mac, that means you can use it only on an iPod formatted for a PC, so you won’t be able to use your Mac-format iPod as a workaround for lack of support on your Mac computer. The array of restrictions and caveats probably says more about the state of the publishing industry, and less about the OverDrive system or your library, but it’s something to be aware of before you check out an Audiobook, and it’s a mute point if you plan to listen on your Windows PC. Fortunately the OverDrive catalogue makes it as easy as possible to navigate the restrictions. Each title in the catalogue has a key of icons, indicating which titles are available for which platforms, so that you can see at a glance whether or not your title will be available for your needs.

Overall it’s a wonderful and modern use of the library’s classic mission, and a welcome addition to Christchurch City Libraries.

Just the same, I have a lot of stuff in my inbox, stuff I delete without opening. Most of it is stuff I thought I would like to hear about, and sometime since the day I signed up I’ve decided that I didn’t. Many of these changes can be attributed to changes in my life; I moved to New Zealand, and am probably not going to be doing any snowy 5k’s in November, and I’m also not as interested in the specials at my favourite bike shop as I once was. But from a marketers perspective, you’d have to argue that many of these are simply missed opportunities. There are a few retailers that I regularly receive emails from whose ads never seem to spark my interest. For example, you would think that a co-operative outdoor equipment store, where I have been a member for years, would detect that I am far more likely to buy a new set of studded bike tires than a baby-jogger, but you wouldn’t know it from their emails. In fact, their emails don’t seem to be targeted at all. I counter imprecise marketing with the imprecise unsubscribe link at the bottom of each message.

Countdown Specials Email

I’ve often thought this blunt-force direct email to be a squandered marketing opportunity, because all that customer history is probably sitting in the same database that is feeding addresses to the email server. But today, my partner Julie amazed me when she showed me an email she received from our local supermarket, Church Corner Countdown (of recent Apple v. Woolies logo dispute fame.) They use the same kind of rewards/loyalty card scheme that has made all our wallets thick with plastic. The idea is pretty simple; I save a few cents for being a “member” and the store gathers information about the sort of thing people like to buy. I used to be a developer at a company that made marketing analytics and reporting software, so there’s certainly tonnes of value in that data. But for some reason that data isn’t ever used to directly market back to the customer. Today Julie’s email proved it can be done, as Countdown provided some genuinely useful commercial email marketing. The email pictures of a number of items that we often buy, with photos and prices, and it notes that we could save $9.29 total if we bought the lot. They also provide a link to get more specials on other things we buy, again, based on our spending habits. The whole system is pretty straightforward and intuitive, and a little box tells me how much I’ve saved so far this year by buying items on special.

Granted, I can’t hide my obsession with Bagel Crisps from Julie any more, but it’s good to know when I can buy them.

People who work in web development have known for quite some time that the effectiveness of this practice has diminished over the last several years, especially with Google. We’ve found that there is more weight given to the use of a keyword within a page, the page’s title, a link to the site containing the term, the proximity of that word to other search terms and any highlighting of the term by bold or italicized type.Basically, great content drives results better than behind-the-scenes trickery, which leads the SEO set to fall back on the common phrase “Content is King.” The theory applies broadly to a company’s message, with the general idea being that despite anyone’s best efforts to trick the search engines into loving your website, your energies are probably better spent creating quality material for it. Not only are you likely to create better search results and more relevant (if not greater numbers of) hits, but you’ll see better sales when you give your visitorsaccurate information about your company and the products you provide. Recall that the reason we build websites is to sell products and services, not just create arbitrary hits.

Of course webmasters, who regularly promote themselves on their ability to get a website highly ranked on a search engine, and getting to the top of Google for a specific search term is most client’s top request. While a lot of promises are made, the reality is that Google’s famous algorithm changes regularly and web developers need to keep up to date with the latest techniques in garnering attention from the almighty Google. The games we used to play with keywords, meta tags, and hidden strings of text are less effective today than they once were, and some of those techniques can actually make your rank worse. In fact today, in a rare official statement about how their algorithm works, Matt Cutts from Google explains that they don’t use the meta keywords at all. Basically, they were too prone to abuse, and since the actual content of a website is what people are looking for anyway, it makes sense to use only human readable text to shape results.

For the small business website that means careful copywriting, carefully choosing the title of each page, and selecting key text to put in bold or italics. More than anything else, Google’s picture of your website is going to be formed by the text on the page more than any other element of the design. Photos, videos and graphics are absolutely necessary to entice the human user once they’re on the site, but for now at least, Google sees your website in text-only mode.

Wordle's Visualisation of this Post

So one should be aware of the picture Google is getting of your website from the text you provide. If you’re visual like I am, you can use a tool like Wordle to get a feel for how your website looks to a search engine, in terms of keyword density, which is another metric SEO gurus like to argue about. You want to make sure that what you’re writing accurately reflects the message that you are trying to send. You want to verify that your writing reflects all the services that you offer, and make sure there isn’t too much overlap between the pages within your site. At the same time you need to be mindful that your copy is most of all there to entice individual human readers to buy your products. Converting Google searches to hits is just the first step, our ultimate goal is to turn hits into sales; so remember that a jumbled mess of keywords may make it to the top of Yahoo, but users will quickly bounce off your home page when they can’t find what they’re looking for. So don’t get carried away or swear off pronouns for the sake of keyword loading to pump up the density, as it turns off users, and creating a suspiciously high keyword density might even turn off the search bots.

Remember that to improve search ranking, we strive to improve the breadth and depth of information on each of our pages, so its more important to highlight key text, and write concise, relevant titles, and not rely on tricks like we used to do with meta tags and keyword loading. Essentially we’re trying to create a website that is a wealth of information about the business, product, or service that it’s dedicated to. Which means we’re not really gaming search rank on Google so much as Google is teaching us to build high-quality websites full of relevant information.

Map of the Southern Cross Cable

When your nation is an island in the South Pacific, the logistics of international communications are as complicated as they are critical to living and conducting business. First off, let me dispel a myth: we’re not connected by satellite, we’re connected by a cable. While high speed satellite communications are in the works for places like Tonga and Vanuatu, it is still faster to handle the internet traffic of four million New Zealanders and 2.5 million visitors by undersea cable. New Zealand’s primary connection is a submarine cable system called The Southern Cross Network. It’s not actually one cable, but a loop of cables that goes through Australia, Fiji, Hawaii, Oregon, and back to Australia via California, Hawaii and New Zealand. The theory is that if one segment of the network goes down, due to an earthquake, storm or some other incident, traffic can be routed the other way around. Physically, submarine cable is smaller in diameter than your average coffee cup, but building and financing thousands of miles cable laying across the open ocean is the work of governments and Tier 1 ISPs, so it’s important to keep their investment in mind when you consider how this connection scheme effects retail pricing of internet connectivity for the end user.

Historically, government owned Telecom New Zealand has been the only player in New Zealand telecommunications. In 1990 Telecom was privatized and a sizable portion was bought by overseas investors, notably Ameritech (now known as AT&T) and Bell Atlantic (now known as Verizon). The privatization also allowed for the entrance of another player into the New Zealand telecommunications market, namely national and foreign-backed New Zealand upstart Clear Communications, which was subsequently merged into Australian firm Telstra, and is now known in New Zealand as TelstraClear. Skip ahead twenty years and a lot of regulatory changes and you’ll find that most people in New Zealand are still connected one way or another through Telecom, though often through a reseller of some sort. Still, the market is opening up with the advent of high-speed wireless communications and expansion of cable TV networks. For many people, wireless 3G service is sufficient for their browsing needs, and is their only internet connection. In some areas, TelstraClear is expanding cable television service, and offering broadband over that system.

While the market is less more open than it was pre-1990, there remains a premium on international traffic which must travel through the Southern Cross link. As such, some retail pricing schemes in New Zealand charge a different rate for international traffic. This is of particular importance to those of us who work in the web design and development space, as it is advantageous to put websites targeted at New Zealanders on networks on the New Zealand side of the Southern Cross, as I don’t want my user be charged extra to access my site. This illustrates a minor glitch in the freedom of the NZ internet market, as users aren’t generally aware of where their data is coming from. While a .nz domain name is a solid indicator that a website is targeted at NZ users, it does not mean that the site is hosted in New Zealand.

A Screenshot of Flagfox for Firefox

To determine that, you’d need to use a plugin such as FlagFox or do a trace route on a site to determine it’s physical location. While it’s a great idea for anyone on such a broadband plan to do so, I don’t see the practice becoming widespread, especially since a website can be created from multiple hosts, or change hosts, or have mirrors around the world, which might back each other up as usage changes. Since ISPs aren’t able to reliably encourage national data use like you might be able to with telephone service, many providers simply charge a monthly fee for broadband including all traffic national and international, limited by total traffic. Right now there are no unlimited (uncapped) broadband packages on offer. A typical internet pack might offer 40GB per month on a full speed ADSL2+ connection for $60 per month. Other plans may have you paying for each megabyte, with varying rates for overseas traffic. The University of Canterbury, for example, has a rate scheme that varies depending on the time of day and whether you’re accessing national or international data.

Those of us from North America might find the lack of an unlimited internet plan and universities that charge students to use the internet in the library as rather shocking, but a Kiwi traveling in the United States or Canada might be equally surprised to learn that free wifi is ubiquitous in most cities. Some New Zealand coffee shops offer scratch-off cards with a passcode for an hour of free internet, while their North American counterparts often leave their wifi running day and night, freely available to anyone in range of the access point.

What this means for the immigrant is that internet service is going to cost more in New Zealand than you’re used to back home. For the tourist it means that you’ll be paying extra for internet in your hotel room, or plugging coins into a machine at an internet cafe. You also may want to check if your mobile device is unlocked, or can be unlocked, so you can use it on a prepay data plan during your visit. For the webmaster it means you’ll have to think about where you choose host sites and the location of your audience, so that they may access your site as cheaply as possible. To the web designer it means that it’s probably a good idea for your website to be serving a mobile version of your website branded to match the standard site, as more people are getting information about your business through smart phones and similar devices since using your notebook by roaming onto public wifi may cost more per month than a getting a data plan for your phone.

Essentially, bandwidth in North America is like tap water; it’s so cheap, it’s not worth the effort of charging for it – in New Zealand, that is definitely not the case.

Thankfully, the internet can help you and Grandma chat anytime, even if she thinks that a Twitter is something to do with The Facebook or maybe The Google. A thoughtful grandkid can hook Grandma up so that she can call New Zealand without any more effort than it takes to arrange a game of euchre.

Here’s how it works:
Grandma calls a local number, which actually goes to a server somewhere, which puts the call out onto the internet directed at my computer. If I’m on my computer, and it’s online, it will ring like a big fancy speakerphone, and I can talk right througth the microphone. If I’m out wandering around New Zealand, or anywhere else really, I can set it to forward her call to my mobile phone, and I’ll pay whatever the local rate is on my end. When I answer, there’s Grandma.
Of course, all this happens in a few seconds, so Grandma doesn’t notice all the switching, and she doesn’t have to listen to any automated menus, or do anything once she’s dialed. All she knows is that she can call a local number and somehow she ends talking to me in a New Zealand grocery store where Julie and I are looking for salsa on the bottom shelf of the International aisle.

Sound awesome? Here’s how you hook it up.
1. Install Skype on your computer.

2. Get an account, and a subscription.
There are usually three to chose from, depending on your spot in the world. Unlimited US/Canada, Unlimited to a specific country, and Unlimited World. Pick whichever works for you, and remember you’ll be calling your own mobile phone from here too.

3. Get Skype To Go, and pick a phone number.
Here you’ll be able to choose a number for the people that will be calling you. I picked one that would be local to my home town. This might not work for everyone everywhere, because this is only available wherever Skype has it set up, but more and more numbers are being added. Chose one that’s going to be cheap for Grandma.

4. Setup Skype Out
If you’ve gotten this far, Grandma can now call you on that local number – but it will only ring on your computer, which is not ideal unless you’re always on the computer. If that’s enough, you’re done.
I set up Skype Out, which rings my mobile number if I don’t pick up on the computer. If you’ve figured out how this works, here is the part you’ll have to pay for, the call to your own mobile. It’s far cheaper than calling direct from overseas tho, and Grandma needn’t know that it costs you a few cents to take her call, otherwise she probably wouldn’t call at all.

The great thing about this setup is that you can log into the Skype web site from anywhere and change which mobile number you’ll forward to. This is particularly useful if you go to another country. So let’s say my phone will roam just fine in Australia, but it costs more than an Aussie phone. I can simply pickup a new SIM card at the airport, plug it in to my GSM phone, and change the number Skype is forwarding to. Grandma still dials the same number, I have a handy local phone to call out on, and my New Zealand voice mails will be there when I get back. If you don’t have a phone that works on the local network, you can just buy or rent a cheap one. The New York Times had a little thing on this in March, which is the same idea. Not only is Grandma happy, but if you’ve got some business contacts overseas, they can reliably dial one number and not worry about where you are this week.

One last trick: if you have a smartphone capable of WiFi there is probably a Skype client for it, which means that you can skip the part where you use your computer as a speakerphone, which is pretty handy as the audio quality is often better on a handset and you can wander the house while you talk like I do. It also means that if you’re near an open WiFi network, and you take the call through the phone’s Skype client, your call will be free. Free calls from your Grandma in Wisconsin to a hostel in Wollongong.

Sample email

Facebook credentials. A page on Facebook page seems to redirect you to a URL defined in the query string. Julie and I have both received emails like the one on the right of this page. They appear to come from Facebook, and contain a that looks something like this.

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.jeffballweg.com

The part after the “?u=” can be any url on the internet, so, in this case, if you click on the link above you’ll be presented with a Facebook page that warns you that you’ll be leaving Facebook and heading to my home page. Of course, my link will cause you no harm – but since you can be redirected anywhere, the actual attack that’s circulating will redirect you to a malicious website.

For the uninitiated, here’s how phishing works: I make a website called www.myTotallyFakeFacebookPage.com and I make it look exactly like the real Facebook. Then I get your email address somehow, either by getting it from someone else or straight spamming it out there. I send you an email that looks just like the emails that Facebook sends, but the link is something like http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.myTotallyFakeFacebookPage.com/passwordStealer.php OK, you’re at work thinking you’re about to see videos of goats falling over so you “Continue” on Facebook’s warning page and you’re forwarded to my site. My site then asks you for your Facebook credentials, which you enter because you appear to be on the real Facebook, and I’ve got your password. I then use your credentials to get your name and your friends email addresses and repeat the scheme.

Technically, Facebook hasn’t done anything wrong here, but whenever you make a page like this, there is bound to be someone that will come up with this kind of use for it.

Max Kelly, head of Facebook security wrote a post about Spam recently, but hasn’t mentioned phishing since his post on August 7th. Facebook seems to have created a list of some of the potentially harmful websites, and the warning page says that the link may be malicious. Still, you’d have to be paying attention to avoid trouble.

Looks like this is the same thing that was making the rounds in August 2007, as noted here by TechCrunch. It looks like its undergone a few tweaks, because it’s resurfaced recently.