Amr Awadallah Blog

This happened to me, and to many other students (at Stanford at least).

Facebook’s initial growth seed was based on an unsolicited spam campaign that they did in fall of 2005. What they did is crawl the university for email addresses of students then registered them en mass and sent them unsolicited registration emails like this one below:

Subject: confirmation email
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:27:57 -0700
From: facebook.com
To: aaa@stanford.edu

Aaaa Aaaa,

You are receiving this email because you just registered at facebook.com. To complete your registration, please follow the link printed below:

http://stanford.facebook.com/confirmation.php?id=216914&code=164252308

Thanks!
the facebook team

Notice that the URL in the email is stanford.facebook.com, this tricked me into believing they were affiliated with Stanford, so when I saw that my name was wrong in the email (it is says “Aaaa Aaaa”), I went to the site and completed the registration to fix my name.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a very nice service and I love their UI, but last time I checked SPAM was illegal in the US, so they gotta pay up. Let me know if you can help :).

— amr