Sunday morning and a frenzy of Tweets about Quechup, (yet) another social network dating site trying to make a name for itself. This time however, it seems to be doing so for all the wrong reasons. Unless you read the signup instructions VERY carefully – and even then you could be fooled – you’ll end up sending a message to everyone in your address book inviting them to take up this service. In the eyes of many, this is spamming.
The Quechup cockup is interesting because it reared its ugly head about a month ago in Belgium but only became an issue in the UK/Ireland when Tom Raftery discovered its potential to spam and started sending Tweets on the subject earlier today.
Chris Hambly offers a measured response, a clear warning about how Quechup harvests addresses yet fails to explain its intent and offers three alternative scenarios:
Quechup have seemingly operated in one of three ways:
1. Purposefully designed their system so new users think that address book importing is part of the mandatory sign-up, i.e. something you MUST do (which it isn’t in fact, you can skip it)
2. Unknowingly created the above environment (not likely)
3. Created the situation where they know mass e-mails will be sent and “hey, if it creates a stir we’ll get a ton of in-bound links and raise our google rankâ€.
In the meantime, Hugh MacLeod (from whom my Quechup invitation came) blows a gasket, while Sam Sethi wraps it all up with plenty of useful illustrations.
My advice? Most ‘normal’ people will pass on this as I did. There’s way too many social networks and dating sites as it is and one more is becoming tiresome. Time to move on. Far more interesting was the Twitter effect; watching people weigh in, ask questions and point to posts on the topic in real-time. It just goes to show that if a topic is important enough, network effects can be extraordinarily useful.
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