Once upon time there was this nice little site called Upscoop, that was pretty interesting. It would scour the e-mail addresses in your gmail/yahoo/etc.. contact list. Then it would show you all the social sites that your contacts belong to. It was pretty fun, and a good way to see what sites people you know are actually using.
This morning my entire gmail contact list was spammed via Rapleaf / Upscoop.
I am sorry to all those people that have e-mailed me via gmail and received this appalling SPAM since I used Upscoop.
This is one reason why we’ve tried our best to make sure that we e-mail people when it is expected. Like if you invite someone to a party, we send an e-mail. We’d never SPAM your guest list. This seems like simple common decency. I wouldn’t want to put this feeling I have on our users.
I understand that Rapleaf and Upscoop are start-ups, but this is just common decency. C-O-M-M-O-N .. D-E-C-E-N-C-Y. They even say on their home page : “It is more profitable to be ethical.” ..um, ha ha?
Ok, not that this was engineering related or anything, but I just had to get that out there.
I would suggest avoiding both of these sites.
Update:
Since then rapleaf has issued a formal apology. Should we forgive blatant spammers? Our court systems don’t let people off with apologies, I’m not sure that spamming is one of those forgivable offenses. Here’s the blog post : http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/09/06/start-ups-privacy-and-being-wrong/
