Badoo
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| badoo logo | |
Type of site | Social network service |
|---|---|
| Available in | Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish |
| Owner | Badoo Ltd. City Business Centre, 25 Lower Road, London, SE16 2XB |
| URL | www.badoo.com |
| Commercial | free, but with a charge for higher prominence |
| Registration | yes |
Badoo is a large-scale internet scam operating under the pretext of a multi-lingual, London based, social networking website. Its main activity is recruiting new members via unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE) chain letters, automatically creating accounts and passwords for them, offering users to share photos and videos, create "reportages" of their lives, and promote themselves and their work.
For example a person might get a mail which reads:
You have a new message on Badoo! See this message in Deutsch, Français, Italiano, Español, Português or 13 other languages. This email was sent by XXXX (xxxx@hotmail.com). If you received this message by mistake, please just ignore it. XXXX left a message for you. Follow this link to open it:
When you follow the link you have to join before you can read the message. Once you have logged in there is no message. When you contact the supposed sender they have not sent any message but everyone in their address book has received the same email. Given enough unsolicited emails resulting in applications to join and read the non-existent messages the Alexa web statistics would of course be very large.
Origins
Launched in May 2006 (although the URL existed as a web portal since 2003), the site now claims to have over 41 million registered users and is one of the top 120 visited sites on the net, according to Alexa Internet.[1][dead link] It is also one of the top ten community websites in Europe.[2]
Unlike other social networking services, Badoo does not incorporate advertising in any part of the site, thus a user's profile contains only user-generated content. It generates income through a "Rise Up" feature which allows users to pay to have their profile given more prominence on the site for a limited time. By the end of 2007, it was reported that 20 % of Badoo's 22 million users access this function once a month.[3]
Timeline
- 2003: URL registered as a web portal site
- May 2006: launched in current form
- September 2007: Badoo re-launched
- December 2007: Badoo named No.2 in Google Zeitgeist fastest rising search terms of 2007 (only below iPhone); named Best Community Website in France and Spain
- January 2008: Finam invests $30 million into Badoo.
- February 2008: Badoo re-launches site again with new features including photo tagging and home page news feed.
- July 2008: Badoo is totally unavailable from South Korea.
References
- ^ "Alexa Internet report on Badoo".
- ^ "Skyrock Network the Dominant French Social Networking Site. Comscore, September 19, 2007".
- ^ Elevator Pitch: Why Badoo wants to be the next word in social networking, Mark Sweney , The Guardian, December 24 2007 , Accessed March 2008.