What we can learn from the Quechup fiasco
Posted on September 3, 2007
Filed Under facebook, review, web 2.0 |
This holiday weekend has been an interesting one in the world of social networks. As I posted before, a few days ago Quechup (a social networking and dating site) spread invites like a virus by snagging the address books of folks who created accounts and spamming every contact with an invite to the network.
Plenty has been written about the practices of the site, their wrong doings, and the aggravation caused by the whole mess so I don’t want to talk about that more. However, the more I think about the mess the more I think about what we can all learn from it. I’ve been brainstorming and trying to boil down my thoughts on this. I welcome feedback, critique, and additions.
What Social Networks can learn:
Be straightforward and transparent: Tell users what you’re going to do with any information they provide on the site. Be clear about policies and procedures. Don’t bury details in a hard-to-read TOS and expect people to find them.
Take criticism: Apologize when your site or your staff do things that make users upset and STOP the practice immediately. A bug shouldn’t function for a minute more than you know about it. Take your site down if you have to but don’t let a bad idea or a mistake become a PR nightmare.
The only invites should be personal invites: Online trust relationships are difficult to establish at best whether they’re between people or between users and a site. Automated invites are meaningless. Don’t send an invite to a user’s contact unless the user has been asked (or at least allowed) to send a personal message along with the invitation.
What Social Network users can learn:
Research a site before you join: Unless the invite you receive is personalized assume it’s spam and check up on the site, send an email to the person who invited you, and do a quick search for stories related to the site.
Screw-ups happen: The internet moves fast. Great ideas can spread just as fast as bad ideas. A few years ago email viruses were the big thing. I don’t know anyone who didn’t become a victim of at least one. I felt horrible every time I received an email from a friend who said they became victim of the Quechup mess when they signed up because the invitation came from me, someone they thought was on top of all of this. Surely, if I invited them it must be a worthwhile site. Each email made me want to club further and further under my desk. Then I realized “Hey! Crap happens” I sent out as many apology messages as I could and tried to let as many people know that they should disregard the invite.
Networks are migratory: Though you may build your network on one site, if a majority of the network moves somewhere else you might follow. Some members of your network might function like scouts, going out to find the new spaces, and report back to the collective about what’s out there. I’m proud to be such a scout but there is responsibility attached to that function. I think I failed in that this time by allowing myself to be tricked by a bad site. Se la vie! We live. We learn.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not claiming that I followed this advice when I made the mistake of signing up but I’ve always believed the only bad experience is the one we don’t learn from. What insight do you take away from this mess?
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5 Responses to “What we can learn from the Quechup fiasco”
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I take away the fact that you are being way too hard on yourself about this…no one lost their bank account or had their computer impossibly “infested”…you are a very responsible person and anyone who really knows you understands…anyone else can go catch a virus!
I agree with Kathy. My mistake was assuming my experiences with Orkut (pretty good), MySpace (ehh, alright with the friends I have on there), and Facebook (painless setup and very little Bacn) would be the norm…assuming Quechup would be the same.
I’ll read the TOS next time, though…or just import contacts manually.
One of the other red flags for me was the fact that I didn’t remember you ever talking about this tool, and I figured someone like you would have at least mentioned it in a blog post once if it was useful. Between that and the impersonal invite, it was enough to make me do a quick Google search and learn more about it.
Kudos to you for being so open about your mistake though. I think it’s a real credit to you for being transparent and sharing your learning experience so we can all be wiser the next time.
To some extent we can spread a bit of the blame to software/application producers who have gotten us acclimated to just saying YES to things - something I call the Yes Syndrome (yes, yes, accept, yes, ok, yes, ok, accept, yes, done) This speaks a bit to the issue of trust but it is also a “necessity” of technology use. By that, I mean, if we want to install that particular application, we have to say yes (since what choice do we have). I think we’ve all learned, read more carefully, and we do have a choice.
One response: be much more wary about social networking sites. More research is required, and more voices needed.