Comments on: Shelfarious Behavior

By: Astroturfing Turkey: Shelfari » The Buzz Bin

Astroturfing Turkey: Shelfari » The Buzz Bin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:39:59 +0000

[...] incident is the lack of attention here in the social media world. Outside of O’Reilly Radar, meyerweb, and select industry specific blogs, nobody’s talking about this astroturfing turkey! And [...]

By: Auron

Auron — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:57:10 +0000

People need to think before they leap into social networking sites. Maybe we need to update an old saying that instead of “fools and money soon part” its now “fools and security soon part.” Way too many people sign up for SNS’s and give away valuable information about themselves and others. The average person would not hand over a cell phone filled with their entire contact list to a door to door salesman. Yet for some reason they will hand over that much information and more to an online service?

That being said i’d rather not blame the victum any more.

Shame to Shelfari for their current actions.

By: Daniel E. Renfer

Daniel E. Renfer — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:20:56 +0000

I had a similar problem with a different social network a while ago. They made it confusing as to what they were doing, and before I knew it, everyone in my contact list (including several mailing lists) were getting invitations to join the latest and greatest “myspace killer”.

I thought I was okay, and I apologized to the people that were offended at me spamming them, but a few days later it happened again. I searched all over the site looking for ways to turn it off, nothing very obvious. I tried sending them a support email, no response. Finally, almost by accident, I found the way to stop this service from spamming everyone every 3 days. I fixed it, and then promptly canceled my account.

By: thacker

thacker — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:39:49 +0000

The legal doctrine of “attractive nuisance” as it applies to minors and Social Networks is being expanded in practice by site owners and developers beyond age limitations. The ‘spam’ issue that you presented is a good example. Web 2.0 could very well end up being casually defined, in a few years, as having been nothing more than just an attractive nuisance.

By: nospam

nospam — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:28:16 +0000

"We make it super easy to invite, but some people just send to all, which isn"t really what we want." This just illustrates the mendacity of Shelfari and why they cannot be trusted. If it's not really what they want, why do they continue to auto-check ALL email addresses in their latest "fix" to the user interface, and declined to change it when asked to? (Clearly it's what they want -- spam drives their membership figures because it fools people into thinking that the spam recommendation is authentic.) People are not cutting them slack because of repeated instances of bad faith Shelfari has shown while supposedly dealing with the problem. They have a history of saying one thing and doing another - or worse, ignoring you altogether.