Hundreds of fake reviews of BBM.
BlackBerry’s BBM app was downloaded 10 million times within 24 hours, but at least on Android, some of its many positive reviews seem to come from a less than savory source. Writer Matt Baxter-Reynolds noted yesterday that a huge number of reviews contained the exact same praise for BBM:
Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth
Blogger Terence Eden looked through more reviews and found more evidence that somebody was astroturfing the Play Store. In addition to the sheer numbers he found, at least one person seemed to have accidentally copied and pasted more of the text than intended: “Dear Mr Ahmed, please post the following comment on the new BlackBerry Messenger APP…” Fake reviews are a frequent issue across many sites, and a September crackdown resulted in fines for 19 companies. More recently, Samsung was fined for hiring commenters to talk up its own products online and leave negative comments about those of its competitors (allegedly HTC.)
Who would do this? Blackberry? Someone looking to harm Blackberry’s rep? Definitely an unneeded black eye.
The @BBM twitter account touched on this the other day: “Those weird duplicate reviews of #BBM on Google Play? Definitely not our doing. Love feedback, but pls keep it real, peeps!”
The problem is that these reviews are too half-assed to have been an attempt by Blackberry. Someone’s looking to damage Blackberry’s image, but it’s so poorly done that it’s more likely to draw sympathy than scorn.
I suppose you could then turn back around and say Blackberry could have done it for people to rally behind them, but it’s still ugly publicity. Highly unlikely they’d do it when they were well aware beforehand that the demand for the app was there.
Remember the weird “Wake up!” campaign in Australia?
Everybody thought it was Samsung, but then it turned out that RIM/Blackberry was behind everything.
So maybe it’s really Blackberry.
But on the other hand – Samsung has already shown that they pay for user reviews.
HTC, LG, Sony and the others don’t have enough money left to pay for reviews^^
And if it were Apple, they wouldn’t have paid for reviews in the ANDROID Play Store.
“Dear Mr Ahmed, please post the following comment on the new BlackBerry Messenger APP. This will show the community that Samsung is not the only one to pay for this service and that it is commonplace.”
Never assume conspiracy where there is a possibility for mere incompetence.
Honestly, my current guess is that it –in its later form– was a meme running wild. I dunno who would have started it, but some of the reviewers have pretty normal reviews on other apps. The “Dear Mr. Ahmed” ‘gotcha’ moment also seems more like an evidence plant to elicit suspicions of conspiracy.
Of course, this is just a gut reaction and not backed up with anything more than my musings on social interaction over the internet.