Posted 09/03/09 at 06:04:50 PM by Pulkit Chandna

After enraging social web luminaries Twitter and Digg, dissident marketing company uSocial has now set its sights on Facebook. It has launched a new service allowing Facebook friends and fans to be bought by the thousands. Facebook buddies are available in multiples of thousand, with the minimum being 1,000 friends and the maximum being 5,000. If it is fans that you are looking to buy, the company can provide up to 10,000 fans.

uSocial is currently offering all the friends/fans packages at introductory prices. While 1,000 Facebook friends or fans can be bought for $177.30, the price for 5,000 friends is $654.30. The current cost of adding 10,000 fans is $1167.30. Although many doubt the worth of buying friends, uSocial founder Leon Hill claims his company delivers targeted friends. "We are getting, basically, targeted friends and fans who are saying, 'Yes, I want information on this,” he told the Associated Press in a phone interview.

He said that friends are added manually by accessing the client’s Facebook profile and sending friendship requests. Facebook is not too pleased by the prospect of users sharing their login information with others.

"Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic," said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.

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Posted 08/17/09 at 05:08:50 PM by Andy Salisbury

Twitter has made recent moves to get rid of web promotion company uSocial by claiming that their means of advertising count as spam.

uSocial’s CEO Leon Hill claims that the accusations from Twitter are false. “The definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false.” He believes that the claims are because of their service, which allows users to buy followers on the popular microblogging site.

“The people at Twitter who are sending these claims are just flailing around trying to look for any excuse they can, though it’s going to take much more than this if they want us to pack up shop,” stated Hill. “We’re not going away that easily.”

So what do you think? Are the folks at uSocial trying to make a buck in a spammy way, or should the folks at Twitter back off? Make your voice heard in the comments.

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