A new study from Harris Interactive confirms through numbers what many of us have been noticing anecdotally: social networking spam is on the rise, and most users are concerned about it.
In the study, which was commissioned by Cloudmark (an anti-spam software company), 66 percent of the 972 social networking users polled indicated that they would be at least "somewhat likely" to switch to another social network if they "received a significant number unwanted, or spam, friend invitations, messages, or postings."
Among the other findings from the study:
* 37% say they have noticed an increase in social network spam in the past 6 months
* 63.9 was the average number of unwanted messages received by social networking users in the past year.
* 80% of users indicated that they are "at least somewhat concerned" about the issue
However, the fact that such a high percentage of users care about the issue and would consider switching to another service because of it is significant, and should be a call for sites like Facebook and Twitter to continue to attack the problem. To that end, Facebook has been continually imposing new rules and restrictions for application developers, while Twitter has mostly depended on a small army of vigilantes to call out the spammers.
The full report is embedded below: