Comment Prepare for SPAM! (Score -1, Insightful) 285
Social network my ass. Try "email harvesting pyramid scheme."
From Huminity's site:
"It's inconceivable to us that people wouldn't want to know about our valuable service!" How very self-serving. Couple this with the fact that:
And you begin to see why I'm seriously disinterested in trying it out.
When evaluating services like this, I want to see who's already there. I want to do this without calling attention to myself or anyone else. If I like what I see, then I'll participate further -- fill out a profile, hook up to already-registered friends, tell other people about it, etc. Forcing me to offer up five contacts as tribute violates this principle.
Friendster gets this part right: You can participate as much or as little as you want, and Friendster contacts your unregistered friends only when you explicitly direct it to. In this respect, Friendster operates as a service, whereas Huminity has the patina of yet another email harvesting operation, in the same light as those someone-has-a-crush-on-you sites.
No sale, guys.
From Huminity's site:
Contacts are notified by a one-time e-mail notification about their inclusion in the Huminity network. We see it as our obligation to notify contacts of their inclusion in the network and allow them at their own will to be delisted. Though this item is sometimes considered wrongly as SPAM by users and contacts, we think that it would be inconceivable NOT to notify contacts about their inclusion, even by their friends.
"It's inconceivable to us that people wouldn't want to know about our valuable service!" How very self-serving. Couple this with the fact that:
- You have to download a custom application whose behavior and security implications are unknown, and,
- You must provide contact data for five people before you're allowed to browse the network.
And you begin to see why I'm seriously disinterested in trying it out.
When evaluating services like this, I want to see who's already there. I want to do this without calling attention to myself or anyone else. If I like what I see, then I'll participate further -- fill out a profile, hook up to already-registered friends, tell other people about it, etc. Forcing me to offer up five contacts as tribute violates this principle.
Friendster gets this part right: You can participate as much or as little as you want, and Friendster contacts your unregistered friends only when you explicitly direct it to. In this respect, Friendster operates as a service, whereas Huminity has the patina of yet another email harvesting operation, in the same light as those someone-has-a-crush-on-you sites.
No sale, guys.
