You have to be really careful if your business relies on someone else's discretion, namely Facebook, Myspace or some such other portal. When Yahoo first released web sites, I built my company website and subsequent shopping cart on a Yahoo website, but as I learned over the course of the next few years, the site was frequently down and frequently buggy - which ended up in lost sales and customers. When Myspace came out a few years later, I created a business that relied on traffic from Myspace, and utilized the bulletins, comments and message options for marketing (not spamming). It became prohibitive, however, once Myspace implemented the Captcha bypass system, putting a series of bottlenecks in place that eliminated the potential of a small business like mine utilizing the platform for even the simplest of messages to customers.
Now Facebook. What is next? Will they implement Captcha or some such other system to slow spammers? It has potential to ruin so many other online businesses...I wonder if it's worth it.
