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Is Flixster Using Deceptive Viral Practices?
Talaria writes "The social networking movie review site Flixster is requesting their users' AOL, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail passwords, and then using them to access users' address books and send 'invitations' to join Flixster, making them appear to come from the user. The password prompt screen includes the ISP's logo right next to the password prompt. Rather than hiding this little 'feature,' Flixster brags about it in an interview after receiving $2 million in venture funding earlier this year." American Venture Magazine notes: "...such practices are becoming increasingly... common as new and even established web sites look to attract visitors without expensive marketing campaigns and a hefty advertising budget."
Really? Literally, actually hear them?
Yes, literally. It's a mental disorder.
Their boss might "insist" on this being implemented, because it was in the signed off functional spec. which the developer is paid to implement.
Since I work in this industry, I know it's the industry with the most terrible feature creep of all. I bet their boss didn't have a clue what he wanted when they started it and they were making up their mind as they go.
Who uses address books anyway? I find the only contacts I put in address books are those for people I will rarely if ever contact again or say, business contacts, and neither of those two catagories include people to whom it would be appropriate to send such flippant spam. Is it so hard to remember someone's email address or perhaps look up a previous message sent from them -- assuming they're not a thoughtless clod with some inane string of random letters and numbers -- if they are really worth exchanging your correspondence? Reminds me of how people can't remember a simple 7-digit phone number anymore, preferring rather to pitch it into their cells and forget about it -- c'mon it's 7 fucking digits, with at most a fairly common 3-digit area code on top. I understand the convenience of an address book, but that doesn't really seem to outweigh the big potential these damn things have for being a big online bomb scattering viri and/or untargeted advertising. This is just one more example and shouldn't we start holding people socially responsible for this garbage? Should be bad manners to get spam from someone because they were careless with their contacts. Then again the "viral" campaigns only work on the blockhead demographic anyway, just be sure you don't wind up in their address books.