Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Web 2.0 spam: Can you trust your online community?
byRecently, I have been reading with great interest stories about sites like Quechup that have spammed their members contacts in an attempt to increase membership. This represents a new breed of aggressive Web 2.0 sites which are attempting to build community not by creating useful and friendly online services to help connect you with your family, friends, and co-workers, but by convincing you to upload your contacts into their systems and then spamming everyone you know without your explicit knowledge or consent.
No, these sites aren’t infecting members’ computers with Outlook viruses, they are soliciting their members to upload contact info all in the name of greater connectivity and communication. It’s been called social network spam, social network “cancer,” and other less generous terms.
This practice strikes at the heart of community-building Web sites: Trust. If you can’t trust an online service to be a good steward of your data (including your contacts, links, photos, or whatever information you store), you won’t use that service, and possibly not others as well. If these sites don’t begin policing their actions, they will only hurt themselves as their membership will dwindle.
