Late last week, we received an invite from Hugh MacLeod to join a new social network called Quechup. While we love Hugh, we need another social network like we need another MediaPost email newsletter. Like many other invites we receive, we ignored it hoping Hugh wouldn’t be too angry. He wasn’t. Mostly because he had no idea he sent the invite in the first place.
While it’s standard practice for a social network to ask you if you want to invite friends from your address book, it’s far from acceptable to do it automatically, behind the scenes without the member having any knowledge the invites have been sent. That’s what Quechup did. That was bad.
All these invites resulted in a mass shit storm across the blogosphere with everyone condemning Quechup for it’s less than ethical practice. Is it any wonder Quechup is owned by iDate, a dating company whose industry is well known for less than above board practices?
While Quechup castrates itself, we’ll go on being more or less happy with our life on Facebook, MySpace, Multiply, Flickr, Squidoo, Gather, LinkedIn and…oh screw it. There’s way too many to count. See what we mean?
