mikemcguff.com: Hold the Quechup

One of the biggest stories on the blogosphere right now has to center around a new social networking site called Quechup. It's so popular that I have received many invitations to it via email in the last week.

But wait.

These blogger's posts aren't praising the site. Actually they are pretty angry about how the site goes about getting new members. (SEE LINKS BELOW)

Before I get ahead of myself, Quechup, which is owned and operated by iDate, touts itself as the place to meet new people, make friends, start a blog, chat online, play online games and hang out & socialize.

I generally play a wait and see approach before joining one of these sites. That paid off this time apparently. Houston blogger Russell Holliman has used the site and let's us in on what he says is the problem:

Facebook allows you to tie your account (temporarily) to an online email service such as Gmail in order to scan for email addresses of people that might already be registered in their system. It's a quick way to find out if any of your friends or contacts are using Facebook. Once scanned, they ask you which if any of your friends that are already in the system would you like to connect with.

With the names of those that aren't in Facebook, they ask if there are any (they let you choose) that you'd like to invite to Facebook. Pretty straight forward and a good way to quickly get up to speed with friends in the system, and drum up more users for Facebook.

Quechup:

They present it pretty much the same way, except that accessing your email account is "Step 2" in their 3 step registration process. Most users think its required. I found the 'opt out' but many I've spoken with swear its not there.

Once they have scanned your contacts, they present you with matches in the system (in my case there were three) and ask you to click an 'invite' button. Everyone assumes that it means to invite those matches to be friends in the system, mainly because it never displays any non-matches. Reading the fine print though reveals that by clicking that button, you are giving them permission to send invitations to the system to every single contact in your address book - no opportunity to choose which ones.

Where is gets really nasty is: I didn't click the button. I dug around until I found the fine print and I closed the window without every accepting their terms or clicking the 'invite' button, but they sent invitations to my entire address book regardless.

Furthermore, when people who have received my invitation click on the link, the resulting web page shows them my Quechup profile, picture and information, regardless of the fact that I deleted my Quechup account. People are still shown my profile as though I am an active user even though I cannot myself log in and use the system any more.