Online Social Network Spam: Growing Trend? - Invitations from Strangers
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Now I’m sure you’ve received invitations from dating networks with dozens of gorgeous women who want to date you; I’ve received that spam myself. And certainly you’ve received spam messages where someone you’ve never heard of claims to be your friend and is inviting you to join some online social network you’ve never heard of; I’ve also received a few of those. But recently I received an offer that surprised me into writing this article in the first place.
It was from StumbleUpon. Since I’d heard of them, I assumed that they would be engaging in ethical practices. And it's quite possible that they are. Their users, on the other hand, might not be. You see, I had never even heard of the person who sent me the invitation! And the auto-generated message did not include any kind of personal note explaining why he'd sent the invitation or introducing himself; just the auto-generated part about wanting to share favorites. He appeared to be real enough; I was able to confirm that via Google. But for the life of me I couldn’t remember him, or figure out where he knew me from that he would send me an invitation to join an online social network.
The invitation came to my work address; I sent an email directly to him in response, asking where he knew me from. My work email address isn’t hard to find or figure out. Anyway, I haven’t heard back from him. I did discover that one of the people he is a fan of is named seogurl. If that indicates an interest in SEO, he may know me through the articles I write. Still, it was more than a bit…disconcerting. Then again, maybe I’m being something of a stick in the mud about this. Heavens, hadn’t Emily Post or Miss Manners covered the proper etiquette for inviting someone to join your online social network?
No, I suppose not. When I Googled the phrase “social network spam” (without quotes), I received nearly 46 million hits. One interesting link led to a very recent post on LibraryThing’s blog, castigating Shelfari for doing basically the same thing as Tagged.com. Among other things, it quotes Jesse Wegman of the New York Observer as saying that Shelfari spammed “every single person with whom I have exchanged an e-mail in the past three years, in addition to every single person who has ever been on the same cc list as I have, regardless of whether we have ever met, in addition to every single listserv I have ever joined and every single Web site from which I have ever ordered anything.” Ouch! On top of that, the post includes links to 51 bloggers and journalists who are upset over Shelfari’s practices.
Next: Other Forms of Social Network Spam >>
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