Infoworld’s “Cringely” observes, regarding the nototious Quechup:
When you sign up for the site it prompts you to share your address book so you can find out which of your 10,000 close personal friends is also trolling for dates on Quechup. But instead of presenting you with a list of friends, Quechup sends an invite from you to everyone in your book — making you look like a nasty purveyor of pork.
I’ve received several dozen of these spams, and have let the people who didn’t realize they were sending them know that they need to rethink their choices of social networks. Quechup is a great example of how to ruin social media.
on Sep 10th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
I realize that it’s rather distateful to blame the hosts when talking about biological viral outbreaks. But with a social virus, there’s some deliberation involved on the part of the host bodies. Take a look at the quechup website. For a social network, it’s got zero sociability to it. There’s no blogging head on the front page, no”about” page, no nothing. Nobody took the time to figure out who the people behind the company are. Robert X. Cringely III only did because the company’s VP, Glenn Fine, sent him an email.
What happened, the super-connected folks got another invitation to a social network, and figured, why not? (Frankly, I’d be happy with a Social Network where Scrabulous wasn’t crashing all the time.)
It’s probably an interesting power-law experiment. Can a meme still thrive if the super-connected try to stamp it out? Curious…