In addition to gaming the social news sites, USocial also offers services for gaining more followers on Twitter, more fans on Facebook, and more recently, more views on YouTube. This latest offering flat-out guarantees your viral video's success by delivering more traffic and more views to your video pages.

Does all this sound too good to be true? Well, it probably is. Only last month, Facebook sent USocial a cease-and-desist letter to the company after an investigation revealed USocial was breaking multiple laws, including illegally accessing the Facebook website and violating the Terms of Service. Among the violations, Facebook stated USocial was sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names, and accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm. Yes, that last one sounds a lot like hacking, doesn't it? Does your business really want fans who were obtained in that way?

According to Dominic Holland, founder of Viralee, a new competitor to USocial, his business offers a better way. In an article on Facebook-watching blog AllFacebook, Holland was quoted as saying: "We do not take control of any users account at any time. We create a page for the user and market it within and externally to Facebook."

On the surface, that sounds more on the up-and-up, but Holland, whose service sells Facebook fans at 10 cents each, won't say exactly how those fans are acquired...and the Viralee website doesn't explain either. What it does show is the company's past efforts - they include fan pages for "Kisses," "Hugs," and "Pizza" as well as ongoing efforts for various sports teams, Australia, and the charity Movember.

In the comments of the AllFacebook post, Holland responds to those questioning whether these "fans" are actually from the U.S. by responding that the service can provide targeted fans. Not that it does by default, just that it can. He also defends the "pay for fans" model by explaining that once you've acquired a good number of these purchased fans, you're then exposed to the friend groups of those fans as well. It sounds like he's saying store-bought fans are just a kick-start method for generating a fan base. The initial group is there to help start the organic growth that comes from natural discovery.

Still, it's hard to feel anything but skepticism for a business whose Twitter account looks like spam bot, filled with keyword-based updates like "performance based advertising," "pay per sale," and "pay per lead," instead of any actual conversation. And considering that Holland was responding on AllFacebook as Viralee's founder using Facebook Connect, you would think he would have updated his Facebook photo to something a little more...uh...professional. While there's nothing wrong with posting "party pics" on Facebook, if you're publicly representing a company, this is not the sort of image that engenders trust...especially if you're asking for people's money.

At the end of the day, companies like Viralee and USocial keep their "marketing" techniques under wraps and undisclosed. They promise fans, but not how they'll get them or whether they're legit. And that's because they're probably not.

But the argument for using these services - as scammy and spammy as they seem to be - is that they let you get a head start on building your social media profile. First come the store-bought fans, then come the real ones. Or so they say. Although few are willing to go on record admitting they're involved with services like this, there's no doubt that many people and businesses are. But the question remains: does any of this really work? And even if it does, is this how you want to achieve success?

"Addiction" is a word that's often tossed around in fun somewhat haphazardly, with people claiming they're "addicted" to everything from chocolate to TV to shoes. But real addiction is no joking matter. An addict is someone with a psychological or physical dependence to something and are unable to put an end to their behavior despite its negative consequences - behavior which, especially in the case of drug or alcohol addiction, can even lead to death. In more recent years, compulsive behaviors like gambling and online gaming have also fallen under the banner of "addiction" in cases where the behaviors become uncontrollable by the affected person.

Given the psychological component of addiction, it's not entirely off-base to question whether becoming addicted to mobile apps is the next big thing in technology-related addictions, as USA Today is obviously doing. But with no reported cases, no research, and no scholarly articles, it seems a little bit like jumping the gun to claim that app addiction is becoming a health issue.

Still, that didn't stop some experts from weighing in on the matter. Marina Picciotto, professor of psychiatry, neurobiology and pharmacology at Yale University told the paper, "there are a few parallels we can make from other addictions, like compulsive shopping. The consequences can be bad -- credit debt, time lost." And Hilarie Cash, a psychotherapist and co-founder of reStart, a Fall City, Washington-based Internet-addiction recovery center, warned that users should keep tabs on whether apps are taking over their real lives.

So how do you know if it's taking over your life? Cash says that if you spend more than 2 hours per day engaged with your digital equipment for non-work related or homework-related reasons, "then you've got cause for alarm."

Wow, if those are the guidelines for addiction then just about every American has television addiction given the 2 hours they sit in front of their TV sets from 8 PM to 10 PM watching primetime programming.

Could this Become a Real Problem?

That's not to say that people won't get addicted to mobile applications at some point, but let's not start a panic before all the data is in. Most of the self-proclaimed "app addicts" these days are still maintaining a healthy balance between work, life and play and are able to put their phones away when the time is right. Even those who use their mobile phones and related apps regularly aren't necessarily addicts in the true sense of the word.

What do you think? Is "app addiction" a real thing? Or will it become a serious problem in the future?

Robert Scoble just admitted to spending 7 hours per day in FriendFeed. It's easy to see why. The more you explore that service, the more you find, and the deeper you fall down into the rabbit hole that is the social web. It's probably one of the most interesting and powerful social sties that we've seen develop over the past year. Yet it, like many other of today's social web services, seems to be a somewhat incomplete vision of what a real social web could be.

I've just spent the past hour and a half finding new people to subscribe to on FriendFeed. As I clicked into their life streams, I also found a ton of articles which I spent time a long time reading. However, I hesitate to share my FriendFeed stats as openly as, say, Louis Gray does. Why? Because they wouldn't be accurate. 

The problem with FriendFeed is that I tend to be a more passive consumer of the information that flows by on the service. Who I "find interesting," according to FriendFeed, has less to do with who I actually find interesting and more to do with who I remembered to "like" through a click of a button. In fact, the items that get "liked" are more often the items that didn't require a long investment of my time in order to absorb. In my stream of "likes," you're probably going to find a lot of funny photos, cool web apps, tweeted quips, and so on. However, the articles that I spent time reading, like this analysis of the Twitter network or this expose of a government employee caught using a cut-rate diploma or even this review of Burger King's social media efforts, are nowhere to be found in my "likes and discussions" tab. The reason? I didn't know I liked them until I clicked through and read the articles.

Yes, I know what you're going to say: I could have hit the "back" button when I finished my reading and then clicked "like" to show that I enjoyed the articles. But the problem, you see, is that would require me to be a much more organized web citizen than I currently am. Instead, I had haphazardly opened these articles in tabs at some point during the day because I thought I might like to read them later. (Yes, sadly, try as I might, my "Read Later" system always reverts back to being open tabs in Firefox.) After opening these tabs, I had then proceeded to interact with FriendFeed as usual. Thanks to the constant flow of content and updates from FriendFeed's fire hose, the original shares and sources of my discovery were lost to me.

Yet, if anything, I liked these items more than the ones I marked with a "like."

It's Not Just FriendFeed...

It's not just FriendFeed that has this issue - every action we take on the social web requires some sort of user input - we have to "like," "share," "bookmark," "update," every little thing we do...and sometimes, it just doesn't feel that natural. On the flip side, there are tools like the semantically-powered Glue, for instance, that quietly shares our behavior with friends. When we visit Wikipedia, search for a new book, CD, or movie, research local restaurants, discover new wines, and more, Glue makes a note of that action which our friends can later review.

Unfortunately, there's no "Glue" for the social web. There's also no happy medium between what it does - quietly observe, record, and share all your actions - and the control you have with a single, manual "like" on FriendFeed. The ideal social tool would be something in the middle. Not entirely passive, but also not requiring you to click, click, click all the time to register your opinions. What this may be, I can't even imagine, but it would have to be something that ties the social web all together. If I read an article in Google Reader, it could get liked on FriendFeed automatically. With one click, I could then Digg it, bookmark it, Twitter it, etc. Oh, and the starting point shouldn't have to be Google Reader. A great tool would provide that same workflow, no matter where you first saw the content.

Clearly, the perfect social tool has not been invented yet, and - who knows? - we could be years away from even seeing anything like it (although I hope not). But it needs to exist because I need to use it. Not next year, not tomorrow, but now. Won't someone please build this, the perfect social tool?