When advertisers prey on Myspace ignoramuses

I’ve seen at least three different sites claiming to be a "see who’s looking at your myspace" deal…  They want you to post a bulletin with a link, picture, whatever.

That can’t possibly work.

The bulletin is never displayed on your profile, so there’s no way to track anything but who is clicking your bulletin.

The ONLY way to track visits to your profile itself would be to add code to your profile page linking to an off-site image.  Bulletins will not work.

I could write a backend to collect the referrer url whenever an image was requested, but said image would have to be on your profile, not in a bulletin.

All those "profile trackers" are doing is getting you to go to their site and increase the chances you’ll click their advertisements.

If you really want to see who’s requesting your profile, get a good webhost and start grepping your logs for requests to that image.  The referring url will include a token from which you can derive your friend’s friend ID, which could in theory be linked back to their profile.

I personally don’t know what encoding algorithm is used for the token, so no…  I won’t write you a friend tracker.  If anyone out there is willing to provide me technical info about how that token is encoded, I’ll be more than willing to write said tracker for you and tell you what you need to paste into your profile.

K, thx.

Leave a Reply