Yesterday, there was a new application going around Facebook that urged users to “confirm” their accounts. In the minutes after the first user clicked on the application link, there began an avalanche of spam messages on multitudes of user walls all over the world.

    This was different from previous spam applications. Before, all the spam bot does is post a random item on your wall and wait for an unsuspecting victim to click on the link to “infect” their account. This one takes is up a couple of notches further. Instead of posting just one item on your wall, it posts a single item on each wall of each person on your friendslist. So just imagine the snowball effect.

    In no time, the Facebook servers were so swamped with spam data that there was no way to scroll down your wall to look up old messages from your wall. It was a near catastrophe. It’s a good thing that Facebook programmers caught it on time so now, it’s all back to normal, more or less.

    Moral of the story: Don’t just click on links and allow just any application to access your data. Just think first for a few seconds. Nobody likes spam (except the ones that come in cans with a Hickory smoked flavor). So just be careful before you create another spamavalanche.