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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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)?
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.
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.
Just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean nobody is. Judging by their quantcast stats, their retention is decent, and a lot better than many overhyped sites beloved by the web 2.0 circle jerk.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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?
"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."
