About privacy, user options and spam
I got back home today and found an invitation from a friend to join Shelfari, supposedly a social network service for book lovers.
I recently heard about Bookmooch and I had a look at it without joining. But this afternoon, in between cooking dinner, cleaning my apartment and chatting to my daughter, I decided to give Shelfari a try.
I never liked this kind of shortcut in finding out who else is on that network (giving them your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail username and password), but until now – with all my bad feelings about giving someone free access to my mailbox – nothing bad ever happened. But there’s a start for everything…I discovered a few friends were already using it and opted for connecting to them, but I specifically de-selected all the other people on my contact list. Pressed “send”, and – SURPRISE! – few minutes later I discovered the invitation WAS SENT to everyone on my contact list… Mailing lists, former students, former co-workers, a few blogs – all got it!
Two minutes later, a friend emailed warning me it happened to her as well and I went in, deleted my account .and started apologizing to people …
A bit of a search on Technorati showed me that it happened to others as well…
That doesn’t make it less embarrassing though:(
If you got the Shelfari message from me, please note that I don’t recommend it…unless you think you can handle the odd interface!
October 30 2007 06:37 pm | Uncategorized