A while back, I named Gazzag.com my enemy for spamming people to join their social network. They have a new enemy partner: Quechup.com

Quechup allows users to import contacts from their email accounts (such as Gmail). The unsuspecting user, provides their login, and Quechup does retrieve their contacts. It then sends an email to every one of those contacts from the user telling them that the user has requested them to join Quechup.

This is annoying and just plain wrong.

Some people will say that users should be more careful about sharing this information with a website, or that they should read the fine print more carefully. However, I reiterate my claim that no reasonable person will want a site to email everyone they know. We all have professional or personal contacts that we would not choose to invite to a social network. I don’t believe that even a giant, dedicated, flashing warning page that alerts users to the fact that all of their contacts are about to be automatically invited in their name is sufficient. This practice, as I said before, is just evil.

I assume the people who run these websites believe that they will automatically get lots of new members by spamming users’ contacts. Instead, they create a lot of angry users who go out of their way to email their friends and actively discourage them from signing up for a network.

Users develop trust in a website for many reasons. Some are simple - appearance, comfort with the community of people there, nice features, etc. Some are more technical - a good privacy policy, parental controls, and the like. Many users come into websites with a base level of trust. This sort of mass invitation violates that trust, and is a sure way to spread negative publicity about your site (such as this post). Users should have explicit, obvious, and protective control over who is invited in their name. By default, no one should be invited. The user should have to knowingly undertake a process to select every person they want invited.

I hope other networks learn from the mistakes of Gazzag and Quechup. The spamming techniques used by these sites is a worst practice of the social networking world.