Honestly, there are people who would yell at a Scout for helping a little old lady cross the street. We built the free social networking tool, Digg Friend Finder, to help people use digg more effectively. We used Digg's API. We followed their TOS. Heck, they could build this functionality into the product if they wanted to, though I am sure they won't.

Black Hat? Who, us?

The very first email (of many) that we received asked us to help them use PHP and curl to pull the results off the page and auto-friend everyone listed.

Uh, dude, if we wanted to help people do that we we would - it is technically very feasable. Simple even. But it would violate Digg's TOS, so we don't do that.

Later in the day we saw a bunch of huge queries running from one IP. Some guy was trying to get large lists of digg users (we think) around unrelated keywords.

Ok, so no TOS violation there, but, silly rabbit, too many friends do not help you use Digg better. If you're reading this, go to my article on Promoting Your Site Through Efficient Friending.

User Your Powers for Good Not Evil

We're happy that so many people are using and liking our Digg Friend Finder, and it looks like most of them are using it with well targeted keywords. So they'll get some great ROI from using our tools.