Should Google Help Us Stop Quechup Spam?
Over the weekend lots of us got spammed by the “social network that’s sweeping the world” (sic). Quechup may be a slightly more egregious bit of social network spam, but they only exaggerate one of the design trends that I think is a real problem — having users upload their login credentials to a mail service. You can even see in the pic above that they claim not to ’spam’ addresses, but then they instantly send out service invites to your contact list. & now those people are in a social graph set not of their own choosing. One person’s viral invite is another person’s spam. This is a terrible design choice that teaches users bad behavior. While it’s done in the guise of helping users add new contacts (a laudable design goal), it’s really a way to boostrap the service off of other people’s contact lists. There are other ways to do this that don’t involve surrendering your address book. And if you’re really dying to tap into Webmail lists, at least do it using something like BBAuth. Thi
