mea culpa. quechup.com

Yeah, Hugh, I was wondering about that. Didn’t seem your style, and I found a rant about them and their process on http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-anti-patterns which sticks the knife in fairly deeply.
– alec

I got on email from them on your behalf earlier today, thought it was a little odd but went ahead and signed up. I’m hoping those fuckers haven’t spammed my entire address book.

Ah, well. That’s what I get when I check my email before checking my feeds. Shit.

Hehe, ok, moral is trust twitter / feeds more than mail 🙂
Good thing their database has been acting up for hours so they did not get me!

I signed up via your invite and was about to see if any of my contacts were already on too. Luckily I got distracted with something.
Good job too.

I think we have to remember that pre-web2 marketing techniques rely largely on, whether malicious or not, tricking people. As someone who’s company has been undergoing an online transition, I can understand having to reign in your baser instincts(or in Quechup’s case, not). Let’s face it, yesterday the Q-folks got a shitload of hits,which in an old-world sense is important, but a simple Google search now reveals a rather staggering onslaught of hate and anger, which will quickly become an onslaught of nothingness and deadness.

Shit, I should have looked at gapingvoid before accepting the invite! How did the site get all those email addresses from you in the first place? I haven’t used the “check for friends” form so hopefully I haven’t added to the damage in any way.

> Hehe, ok, moral is trust twitter / feeds more than mail 🙂
Also, don’t enter your user/password for X on anything other than the login page of X.
Same goes for webpages offering to check your email for you, or web-based FTP interfaces that can upload stuff to your homepage for you.. you don’t know what else they’re going to do with your account info.
Regards, Martin

I got about 14 of these yesterday (only three of them from you, Hugh!). Anyway, it was enough of them that I ignored it 🙂
Rob

I didn’t get one! I didn’t get one! Ha de Ha de Ha Ha. Nah Nah de Nah … Oh wait. Nevermind.

Damn.
I thought to myself, ooh, the mighty Hugh wants to invite little old ME to some cool new social network. That has to be good.
I even emailed a geek friend to boast.
Now I feel unwanted, unloved and silly.
DAMN YOU MACLEOD.
😉

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity…
I signed up to linked in a while back and they gave the option to check my email account to see if any of my contacts were already on linked in – I chose not to give them my email username / password
trust no-one

Hell, I was just happy to get mail from you! LOL Hope you have a great week!

It’s disgraceful when that happens. Didn’t Adriana suffer the same fate with something similar a while back?
Fortunately I deleted Hugh’s and CC Chapman’s invites to Quetchup because I’m suffering from social network fatigue.
Looking on the bright side – Quetchup must now be officially fucked. They can’t possibly hope to survive this kind of bad publicity.

Hmmm. Not only is it embarrassing, although their bad behaviour is not your responsibility, but doesn’t this violate a LOT of European data use laws. They are in general stricter than the the USA equivalents, and I am sure that they have not though about this in detail.
lawyerfest, methinks. (If you are in the UK or Europe…)

Yeah, I got yours, and checked my contact list and got hit too. Stupid. I really should know better. It’s pretty shifty to spam everyone when all you’re doing is checking your address book for others you know in the system, though.

You sent me an invitation, I accepted,
they have spam my all contact list I feel really bad.
Should have known better.
Next time i will be very very carefull

I aborted the whole thing at registration.. YET… they still spammed hundreds in my contact list. It was very early in the morning, when I opened the email and began registering, perhaps I let something slip but I don’t think so.
Very disappointing and so completely embarassing. I’m not going to beat myself up over it and don’t you either Hugh.

Hi Hugh
I signed up as soon as you sent me the invite and my gmail mail list got commandeered by these, sad to say, less than honorable people. I forgot to do my usual due diligence.
Here’s my letter to one of their management types and sorry in advance for a long note:
“Guys
I was invited by a blogging acquaintance, Hugh MacLeod to join your site.
Sadly I did without doing proper due diligence and the iDate owners, marketing geniuses and your software designers, a bunch of bottom feeders-let me be polite and not express my feelings, have serious screwed me over either intentionally or inadvertently. First of all I assumed it was some sort of a social networking site and Quechup turned out to be another spam engine. The fact that I was asked a bunch of personal details should have set off alarm bells but having worked non-stop for 18+ hours I signed on.
I signed up as a heterosexual and most heteros typically would like to meet a WOMAN, unless you play for both teams, which I don’t. So why the heck would you all send it to my entire freaking gmail email list where I have all my professional/business colleagues. And you did not seek my permission either.
This is absolutely unacceptable and if you do not remove my name from your membership rolls and DELETE ALL MY contacts I will inform (whether or not they pay any attention to my email) all the major web 2.0 software review sites including Techcrunch, Gigaom and other even more nastier review sites – its your call. I will do this by
Friday Sept 7th unless you do as I ask and send me mail to confirm that you have deleted my name and my gmail contacts from your database.
Gary Valan”