I’m not sure if something in Facebook has changed recently, but I just got my first bit of spam.
I’m sure she’s a lovely girl and all, but isn’t part of the whole idea of social networks that they prevent spam by restricting messaging or email to your group of approved friends? Yes, you can still send and receive to “strangers” (how else to see if the Bob Jones you saw in a search is the same Bob Jones who used to beat you up in high school or not, but this is the first bit of what I consider “pure” spam email I’ve gotten on the site.
If the trend continues, or Facebook removes privacy and restrictions to allow “monetization” (read: selling of it’s users private information for boatloads of cold hard cash) I can see it becoming useless very fast for a large number of people who use it. Of course, to survive as a company and to be able to pump the gazillion’s of dollars into the site for bandwidth, development, etc, I’m sure they are walking a thin line between selling out and providing a level of privacy and fairness to it’s thousands of users.