Kicks and Kisses

I am getting lot^2 invitations to Join Shelfari which is a social networking websites related to books. Earlier I was thinking of joining it but now I will never join it.

The product planners have taken a wrong approach to bring more and more users to product. Once you click on an invitation it asks you to choose user name and password. In the second screen it shows you Gmail login screen and once you login it sends invitation to your entire Gmail address list or the people whom you ever interacted. More than that it send sends multiple auto generated emails.

I have received at least 10 invitation from a single user with subject like “Do we like the same Books”. I emailed this sender saying please do not spam me, and he is getting similar emails from other friends too. I’ts a really embarrassing situation for the person who has Joined Shelfari and has sent invitation by mistake to all his Gmail address book. These tricks sometime create a bad image of the product and may be after some time people never use it. Similar cases I have seen with Yaari.com which a copy of orkut.com.

People have different type of email address in their address books like a VP of a company, HR of a Company, A discussion board group ID and similar which are very sensitive where one will never send such invitation but I have seen people sending invitation on yahoo groups where thousand of other user thinks bad about the sender not about the product.

It’s a good example of intentional unusability for money…