

Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Website - designtofly
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1903810,00.html

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paulgb
It's a shame the author didn't make a more general warning not to give your
email password to a site you didn't know about 30 seconds earlier. Until
people start protecting their passwords, they are bound to get taken advantage
of like this.

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ironkeith
Wow, after about 10 seconds I'd vote time.com to be the world's 2nd most
annoying website. For some bizarre reason it kept forcing my scroll back to
the top of the page (safari 4), making it impossible to read the article.

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djahng
same here (Safar 4), but it stops scrolling back to the top of the page after
the page completely finishes loading...

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prodigal_erik
I interviewed with them, and let them know I was concerned about the
reputation they were starting to develop, partly over the same issue. That was
two years ago.

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beefman
I briefly had a job with these idiots (for one month in 2005). The whole thing
was conceived as a way to gather addresses for one of the largest spam
operations in North America, which the FTC subsequently shut down.

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tokenadult
"But I've been burned, so here's my advice: If you get any kind of message
from Tagged, delete it. Avoid the site altogether."

Hear. Hear. Nothing but junk on that site, and annoyance for your friends.

~~~
tdavis
Better advice: Don't input your email credentials into any site that isn't
your email host. Simple.

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SwellJoe
The fact that legitimate sites ask for this information is _really_ bad for
consumers. It makes them think it's business as usual to just give away their
passwords to anybody that happens to have a website and a button that says
"Import my contacts" or "Tell my friends" or "Send me money" or whatever.

Even _if_ we can trust Facebook with this information, it lends an air of
nonchalance to the practice.

~~~
pj
The problem is that even _you_ think you can trust facebook. It's only a
matter of time until this kind of stuff starts there too. I've already gotten
lots of spam from them. People even put _my_ email address into facebook
without my permission.

It's ruining the internet.

~~~
SwellJoe
Note that I said, "even _if_ we can trust Facebook". I consider the "if" a
significant word in this context.

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nkassis
blatant lies from that CTO. He knows the site is deceiving.

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jessep
seriously. i've gotten a number of Tagged spams from unsavvy folks over the
years. the tagged people are just dbs.

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pavel_lishin
I received three of these from one client. I especially loved the warning that
"You have to click!"

Of course, I knew that I didn't have to do any such damned thing. But I wonder
what threat Grandma imagined looming over her if she didn't click either of
the options in the e-mail?

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sweetdreams
This is one of those situations where you evaluate who sent you the invite. My
aunt who can barely figure out her Macbook: don't click on it. Cool friend who
knows tech: click on it. Guess which one invited me to Tagged?

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MaysonL
What does it say about me that I haven't (yet) received a single Tagged email
in the past 4-1/2 years (assuming Gmail search is working), unless they got
shunted off to spam folder (which doesn't have any, currently)?

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niyazpk
I am sad that they do this in a website with over 70 million monthly visits!
Greed.

Lesson learned: If you are bad in the beginning, you will continue to be bad
even after you are successful.

~~~
whughes
Where do you think they get the 70 million monthly visits from? I don't know
anyone that actually uses Tagged as a social network. It would seem to me that
the simplest explanation is that their bad behavior is the only reason they
maintain any kind of popularity. No one is going back to Tagged and continuing
to use the site, so they'd lose everything if they stopped expanding.

~~~
rjprins
Just two weeks ago I bought a second hand laptop from the type of guy who
actually uses Tagged. I can give you a profile:

\- Single male, 40+

\- Low income

\- He and his house were a mess.

\- Smokes a lot (the laptop still smells horrible, after cleaning thrice)

He actually left all his shit on the laptop and when I opened Firefox,
Tagged.com opened, with his account logged in. Call me an amoral bastard, but
I checked out his account, here is the sole reason he uses Tagged:

To meet women. The only women on Tagged apparantly are East-European women,
who would like to marry a West-European guy. He told me he was selling the
laptop because he was going on a holiday to Lituania and he needed the money.
Nobody goes to Lituania on a holiday, I initially thought he must have family
there. But in his messages I found out he hooked up with some girl. So, I
guess Tagged can serve your goals.. if your goals are shady like the site.

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jimboyoungblood
Why does the article call them "Harvard math majors"? They're both physics
guys. In fact are both are Ph.D students in the Stanford physics department.

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tokenadult
_Why does the article call them "Harvard math majors"?_

Maybe because they both majored in math (as undergraduate students) at
Harvard?

[http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/03/tech_entrepreneurs/s...](http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/03/tech_entrepreneurs/source/9.htm)

~~~
jimboyoungblood
Wow you're clever.

But if you look at their CV's, they are _much_ more credentialed as physics
geeks than as math geeks. So why does the author choose to call them "math
majors"? It seems like the choice must have been intentional, but I have no
idea what purpose it would serve.

From: <http://corp.tagged.com/management.html>

"Greg holds an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics & Mathematics from Harvard
University, where he served as a Director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club
(HEC) from 1998-2000 and co-authored The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to
Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). Greg is presently on leave from
Stanford University, where he is pursuing the Ph.D. in Physics on a National
Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship"

"Johann holds an A.B. in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University. He
is presently on leave from the Physics Ph.D. program at Stanford University,
where he has studied with support from the National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship, the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and the Hertz
Foundation Fellowship Research Grant."

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tokenadult
_It seems like the choice must have been intentional_

It may just be what the writer recalled at the moment he wrote.

By the way, if I remember correctly, the physics and mathematics concentration
at Harvard is distinct from majoring in math by itself and distinct from
majoring in physics by itself. But presumably the concentration requires quite
a strong knowledge of math.

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towelrod
I'm confused. How did tagged get his contact list? If he's dumb enough to
enter his username and password from gmail or whatever into some spam of the
week website, then its his fault.

Or does tagged get that information some other way, like a partnership with
yahoo or something?

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absconditus
"Basically, as I remember, I registered for the site through a Windows Live
hotmail address, and very early on in the process it asked if I would like to
send along a similar message to every contact in my account."

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chanux
Tagged is good. It reminds that still there are idiots in this world & I
should be careful with that.

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loglaunch
i would call about.com the most annoying website ever

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SwellJoe
about.com has never spammed me. Tagged.com wins.

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bena
Who else sees this as a challenge to either find a more annoying site, or make
one?

