zohair ahmad » Keep Away From Me, Shelfari!!

Posted on 04-16-2008 under web crawling

This book logging idea has caught on good. I wrote about this earlier in my post on Goodreads. Recently I found out about Librarything, which pulls information on titles from 60+ online resoures.

A couple of days ago, I received an email to join this new site Shelfari. At first I ignored it, but I got a repeat email today. (Later I find out this was part of the evil mess.) So I registered.

According to Thingology (Library Thing’s blog), Shelfari has been accused of spamming its users’ contacts. It gets the contact list from your email account during registration and then (horrors!!) stores it, using it later to spam your entire contact list. Everyone. Including mailing lists.

Thank God I didn’t give those people my email password. And thank God, I thought of doing a search on the site’s validity.

 /me shudders

So guys. If you’ve been invited to join Shelfari, DONT! Join Librarything, or Goodreads, or some of the other fine book logging sites out there. You have been warned!

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4 comments so far.

On Apr 17 2008 @ 00:25, Josh said: | Quote

Zohair,

This is Josh from Shelfari. I wanted to point you to a blog post I wrote last fall in response to all the accusations about our invitations.

http://shelfari.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/invitation-desi.html

Just like competing sites, we do everything we can to avoid people sending unwanted emails. I’d love to have you checkout Shelfari and tell us what you think!

Happy Reading,

Josh

On Apr 17 2008 @ 00:40, zohair said: | Quote

Zohair,

This is Josh from Shelfari. I wanted to point you to a blog post I wrote last fall in response to all the accusations about our invitations.

http://shelfari.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/invitation-desi.html

Just like competing sites, we do everything we can to avoid people sending unwanted emails. I’d love to have you checkout Shelfari and tell us what you think!

Happy Reading,

Josh

Well Josh, thanks for the link. Call me paranoid, but I still don’t like the idea of shelfari resending the registration email to people who choose to ignore it. I also second the comments about the opt-out design. Until these things change, I’m staying on goodreads.

On Apr 22 2008 @ 10:06, nospam said: | Quote

Hmmm, has Shelfari restarted its spam campaign on the sly? They caught major flak for it a few months ago. Lying low for a few months and waiting for the storm to blow over, then restarting the spam won’t make Shelfari a lot of friends a second time round. The internet has elephantine memories.

On Apr 22 2008 @ 11:24, zohair said: | Quote

Hmmm, has Shelfari restarted its spam campaign on the sly? They caught major flak for it a few months ago. Lying low for a few months and waiting for the storm to blow over, then restarting the spam won’t make Shelfari a lot of friends a second time round. The internet has elephantine memories.

Can’t argue with that. Hopefully most people will have got the message, and will stay clear.

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[quote comment=""][quote comment=""]Hmmm, has Shelfari restarted its spam campaign on the sly? They caught major flak for it a few months ago. Lying low for a few months and waiting for the storm to blow over, then restarting the spam won't make Shelfari a lot of friends a second time round. The internet has elephantine memories.[/quote] Can't argue with that. Hopefully most people will have got the message, and will stay clear.[/quote]