Apple's Ping, a wretched hive of spam and villainy

That didn't take long. We're on day two of Apple's Ping and it's already showing the telltale signs of a social network being dirtied up. It doesn't take long for prospectors to spot a potential gold mine, and by "prospectors," of course, I mean no good dirty spammers.

If you're a Facebook or Myspace user, you've already seen it all before: friends getting hacked and hawking free iPhones or accounts with porn stars as avatars trying to get you to click who-knows-where-it-goes links.

On Ping, the damage right now is mostly being done to the pages of popular musical artists, such as Dave Matthews Band and Katy Perry. Spammers will make an account, forgo any frills such as an avatar and what have you, and then — as their name implies — start spamming links for free gadgetry all over the darn place as long as you click a link and take a million shady surveys.

The explosive surge of spam is right now being blamed on the fact that, unlike the iTunes store, you don't have to put in your credit card information to open an account. With such a young social network, there's a fine line that has to be walked, where it's easy enough to start an account so you'll get a lot of them, but secure enough that you don't let in the riff-raff. Facebook took this to the extreme in its earliest days, requiring you to have a college email (which the site doesn't force anymore).

Apple made it easy. Far, far too easy. Now, on day two, Ping already feels decidedly icky.

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