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Go Away!
This is not directed at any particular person, nor just current users of these services, but please understand my annoyance if you are.
I HATE these websites that supposedly keep you in touch with your friends. A few of them are Friendster, Bebo, Ringo, NamesDatabase.
I keep getting invites from friends trying to keep their address lists current, the idea behind most of these sites is to add all of your friends/contacts, and the site will email an invitation to those people and try to get THEM to sign up too. The reason being that if you sign up and change your email address at sometime in the future, then it'll also be changed in your linked friends' lists too automatically.
Great idea in theory, but even after reading the Privacy Policy for each site where they state that your email address will only be used for good, how can you be 100% certain that it won't fall into the wrong hands? It's bad enough spammers can get hold of your email address, without it being confirmed as 100% working on some website.
Maybe it's rather hypocritical, I use my email address all over the place... since I order stuff online all the time, but at least then I have some sort of control of where my address is typed in. Ah well... I can still just ignore all the invites I receive, just like ordinary spam.
Posted in Rant at 12:57
How so very true. I like to think I keep my "proper" email address pretty private, and in the year I've had it I only get about 5 spam emails a week.
1) This is thanks to a variety of reasons... I make sure my friends know I don't like chain emails (they can be used by harvesting programs, where the scan all the body of the email for addresses).
2) I have a pretty decent third party spam filter on my domain.
3) If I have to put my email address on somewhere I don't trust entirely, I put another email address in insted.
4) I try to make it clear in my comedy signature that I will kill your kitten if you type my email address in anywhere on the internet, and don't send me chain emails, and please for the love of God don't send me any virus warnings...
Call me a cynic, but these "friend" lists are just a clever method of collecting email addresses. Plus them "someone has a crush on you, go here and type in the email address of the person you think it is". Regardless of how much they company says they'll never pass on the details, I still don't believe them!