A correspondent at The Daily Show decided to cover the iFart and Pull My Finger legal battle recently in a parody form. Joel Comm of iFart and Eric Stratton of Pull My Finger was interviewed by The Daily Show.
The parent company of iFart is InfoMedia and the parent company of Pull My Finger is Air-O-Matic.
Stratton said that iFart ripped his application idea off and used the expression Pull My Finger in the description to misdirect consumers into finding iFart instead. iFart made over $40,000 in the first 2 days when hitting the top of iTunes.
The best part of the interview was the Daily Show correspondent’s reply to the MC Hammer application that Joel Comm talked about. Watch the video clip above to find out what he says.
Joel Comm has quite an extensive track record for making money on the Internet. In 1995, Joe launched WorldVillage.com and two years later sold ClassicGames.com to Yahoo! After that, Joel launched several online shopping websites and then wrote a book called The AdSense Code, a New York Times best seller. To top all that off, he came up with the iFart application, the #1 iPhone application for three consecutive weeks. Last year Comm hosted the first Internet reality show called “the Next Internet Millionaire.” Comm is currently working on a “Twitter Power” book.
Even after all this credibility, Facebook decided to kick him off their social network. Comm has 4,999 Facebook friends and then sent messages to about 30 of the 900 people that wanted to add him. Facebook maximizes the number of friends that you can add at 4,999. Facebook believed that the message that he was sending to the friend requests was considered “spam.”
Comm told Robert Scoble that he received a warning for sending the messages and stopped immediately after, but they still kicked him off two days later. The two messages that Comm sent to his friend requesters include:
“Thanks for the request! I’ve reached my 5000 friend limit on Facebook, but you can follow me on my fan page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Joel-Comm/9907159309?ref=s
Hope to see you there!”
and
“hiya! I’m glad you had the opportunity to see me speak at Harv Eker’s event. I’m at my Facebook friend limit, but visit my blog and you can stay up to date on my activities. http://www.joelcomm.com”
Some people want to use Facebook as a marketing tool and want to reach out to as many people as possible without actually knowing the people in real life. Is this a fair use for Facebook? I believe if MySpace has no problem with it, neither should Facebook.
