Adding 1000’s of friends on myspace

 I hope you didn’t come here looking for the secret to adding lots of strangers as friends on MySpace because this info is only for those of you with an existing list of contacts. 

This entry deals with two things:

          1. Sending Add requests to a big (1,000+) list of emails and

          2. Storing the links to those people’s myspace pages in a database.

As some of you know, MySpace provides a tool for Adding people from your personal email account automatically.  This is cool not only because you won’t have to search the website for each person individually, but you also won’t have to answer any security questions like “What’s their last Name??”, it just sends the Adds on through based on you having their email address alone.  This is probably how Dane Cook got his millions of friends…

So the first task you must undertake is to import your contacts to an email account that MySpace can access.  I used Gmail, but others are available such as Yahoo!, AOL, Windows LIVE Hotmail, Windows LIVE Messenger and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger).   In order to import contacts to Gmail (and other email programs) you will need to export your records from your database in a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file.  Other formats may work, but this is the most common.

Something important to consider is MySpace limits your Adds to 400 people per day using this import method.  I cut my list up into groups of 1,000 for daily import to Gmail and then subsequent Adds via MySpace’s tool.  This gave me about 280 matches for every 1,000, which I found acceptable for daily Adding.  Once you run the tool, right before they ask you to click “Add to Friends”, you see a list of matches.  CTRL+A copies the entire list (along with other garbage) and you can then paste that list into MS EXCEL or your spreadsheet of choice.  After you delete the garbage rows from the top and bottom of the spreadsheet, you still have to find out what lies underneath the links you pasted without going to each one and manually retrieving it.   I’ve written about this before, but here it is again.

Open up the Visual Basic editor and create a new module.  Paste this code into the module:

Function HyperLinkText(pRange As Range) As String
        Dim ST1 As String
        Dim ST2 As String
        If pRange.Hyperlinks.Count = 0 Then
           Exit Function
        End If
        ST1 = pRange.Hyperlinks(1).Address
        ST2 = pRange.Hyperlinks(1).SubAddress
        If ST2 <> “” Then
           ST1 = “[” & ST1 & “]” & ST2
        End If
        HyperLinkText = ST1
    End Function

Now you can use that function to find out the hyperlink that is hidden on your page.  Simply type “=HyperlinkText(A1)” into a cell in a column to the right where A1 is a cell that has a link in it and press Enter.  You should see the URL appear in that cell.  After that you can drag that formula down the page until you have gotten all the links.  Save it and Import that file into your database.  You may have to SAVE AS Excel 2003 if your database can’t open an XLSX file.  Since you have the email address in the record, you can use that to match up the Adds to Client IDs in your database.  Be aware that you may have more than one Client with the same email address, so run a Find Duplicates query on your records after matching them up.  I did that and then afterward I opened each MySpace page and determined whose MySpace page it actually was and then assigned the correct Client ID to that record.