Zero Degrees style…
Yesterday on Stowe Boyd's Working Model weblog a post appeared —
Connect with me in ZeroDegrees? — and I
thought, hmmm that looks familiar.
Wait a minute — Stowe hardly posts at A Working Model anymore, he posts over at Get Real… Well, in addition to unknowingly spamming everyone in his address book it appears Stowe also spammed his own Working Model Weblog. [Stowe explains how and why in his — New Zero Degrees' Outlook Plug-in: I've Socially Spammed Hundreds By Mistake! — post today.]
Both Stowe Boyd and Christopher Allen published their frustration with Zero Degrees new "let's spam your entire address book without even really notifying you" function… I got 'spammed' by both Stowe and Christopher yesterday, no bother really, but I was wondering what was up…
Ross Mayfield writes about the root cause of Christopher and Stowe's woes on Many2Many — and I just thought I would jump in here with a 'yikes'! — Is this what happens when Barry Diller sucks in a new company — under-documented functionality to boost membership by inviting all of the contacts in your address book without sufficient warning about what you are about to do?!?
Ross makes a good point about Zero Degrees' 320k membership vs. LinkedIn's 20M — which ties in to a previous Stowe Boyd post on LinkedIn's dominance in "Internet Presence" — TrendIQ Social Networking "Internet Presence" — with the following graph from the TrendIQ site:
Stowe Boyd, Christopher Allen, and Ross Mayfield were all on top of this 'social spamming' item — it was great to track the near-real-time conversation on all of their weblogs… (-:=
1. i received an invite from Stove too. I just figured Stowe was checking out the site too. I am a member at most of the social networking sites and like checking the different ones out, so i didn't hesitate. i was considering inviting my network to zerodegrees too. i think i'll investigate a bit more b4 I do that, though.
Posted at 8:04PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Peter Caputa