Comment Comments from a Flixster founder (Score 2, Interesting) 190
Hi all,
I am one of the co-founders of flixster - a friend pointed me to this discussion. I would like to clarify a few things:
1. We DO offer the ability for users to select friends from their hotmail/yahoo/etc address books. This is a very common practice on social sites like ours - LinkedIn/Yelp/Facebook/MySpace/StumbleUpon/etc all do exactly the same thing. Its an optional convenience feature for users and we are not deceptive or misleading about it in any way.
2. We do NOT store anyone's username/pwd info in any way. We use it one-time only to retrieve their contacts as they go through the invitation process and that is it.
3. We NEVER send invitations without the user's consent. For users that access their address books are always the next screen is always just a list of their contacts and they get to select whom to invite.
4. We are a small company and we take our users privacy very seriously. Needless to say i am disappointed that we somehow became the example site around which to have this discussion - although it is actually a good discussion to have. The world would be a safer place for users if all of these social platforms (MySpace counts too - tons of sites ask for MySpace passwords to auto-post widgets onto your page - its the same thing) had secure APIs which would allow reputable companies to integrate with them in ways that were still user friendly. We and many others would welcome this - its just not there yet.
If you have questions about flixster or further thoughts on this in general - feel free to drop me a note via the link above.
Sincerely,
Joe G
Flixster Co-founder
I am one of the co-founders of flixster - a friend pointed me to this discussion. I would like to clarify a few things:
1. We DO offer the ability for users to select friends from their hotmail/yahoo/etc address books. This is a very common practice on social sites like ours - LinkedIn/Yelp/Facebook/MySpace/StumbleUpon/etc all do exactly the same thing. Its an optional convenience feature for users and we are not deceptive or misleading about it in any way.
2. We do NOT store anyone's username/pwd info in any way. We use it one-time only to retrieve their contacts as they go through the invitation process and that is it.
3. We NEVER send invitations without the user's consent. For users that access their address books are always the next screen is always just a list of their contacts and they get to select whom to invite.
4. We are a small company and we take our users privacy very seriously. Needless to say i am disappointed that we somehow became the example site around which to have this discussion - although it is actually a good discussion to have. The world would be a safer place for users if all of these social platforms (MySpace counts too - tons of sites ask for MySpace passwords to auto-post widgets onto your page - its the same thing) had secure APIs which would allow reputable companies to integrate with them in ways that were still user friendly. We and many others would welcome this - its just not there yet.
If you have questions about flixster or further thoughts on this in general - feel free to drop me a note via the link above.
Sincerely,
Joe G
Flixster Co-founder
