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May 1, 2004
Orkut spams in your name
Posted by Seb Paquet
After a few quiet months, all of a sudden I'm getting a new spurt of Orkut invitations from friends whose invitations I thought I had already declined. I was wondering why, until I found this
explanation on Scott Allen's weblog:
Apparently, Orkut took it upon itself to re-invite all the people I had put in as friends who hadn’t joined yet. Bad enough that they did it. Worse, they did it in my name. That’s right — they resent my original invitation!. 90 days later!
This is horrifying to me. A serious academic in the space and a CEO both were polite enough to reply to me saying they weren’t interested. I have no idea what the various major journalists, etc., must think. I end up coming across as a petulant nuisance, and I don’t even know it’s happening!
I guess Orkut is trying its best at following the trend of socially inept YASNS behavior, though I have to say it falls short of being as craptacular as "ZeroDegrees' prior art":http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/04/15/how_to_achieve_zero_degrees_of_separation.php.
Comments (5)
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1. Christopher Schmidt on May 1, 2004 10:43 AM writes...
The problem was technical in nature, rather than malicious or in any other way related to something more sinister afoot. There was a mail server that got clogged up with a bunch of emails, and there was no way to know which ones had actually gotten sent - or so it seems from their news page. (You do read their news page, right?)
I got a bunch of people who finally joined because my invites just went through. I'm not sure how many didn't join, but Orkut wasn't "spamming" - they were resending invites that they weren't sure had gone out.
It's beta test software, and there are bound to be bugs. Although in this case, they are unfortunate, they still aren't due to Malicious behavior so much as technical failure.
Permalink to Comment2. Valdis on May 1, 2004 10:59 AM writes...
Kind of reminds me of Plaxo and how they angered thousands with good intentions.
Permalink to Comment3. Glenn Fleishman on May 1, 2004 11:56 AM writes...
It took me several tries to get Orkut to remove my account and to stop sending me email. I had a lot of very nice back and forth. I'd say, please cancel account. They'd say, great, we did, sorry you're leaving. Then I'd get requests to join groups that I was moderator of. I'd reply to the requestor (sorry, I'm no longer a member), and to Orkut (really, please remove me). Sorry, sorry, they say, we've removed you. On the 5th or 6th try when I said I was at the point where Orkut email gets put on my blacklist and reported as spam, they finally managed to explain that on an invitation I should click the unsubscribe link and that they'd finally managed to remove me. The problem with betas.
I agree with both commenters Christopher and Valdis: it's good intentions, and the road to hell (and unhappiness and blacklisting) is paved with such.
Permalink to Comment4. lee knouse on May 5, 2004 2:53 PM writes...
Could you send a Orkut invitation please?
Permalink to Comment5. johann on May 26, 2004 4:09 PM writes...
orkut invite please?
i figure i can't get a gmail invite i'll spend time looking for an orkut one.
not a bad way to spend a work day on a scavanger hunt!
cheerios
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