Tricks social networking sites play

There's this new social networking site called Gazzag that is gaining quite a few numbers because it offers people the option of automating processes to add their friends from Orkut and Multiply.

What is does is pretty clever (or sneaky, depending on your point of view). Take a look at this:


BlueChipExperts dangles the carrot of $$ as referral awards and tries to ride over the backs of your networks on Linkedin and contact management systems like Plaxo, by exporting CSV files from them.


Would you say these are forms of spam? I know the Linkedin egroups recently had a huge outpouring of anger against BCE.

Are they trying to ride on the success of the older more established networks? Absolutely. But these efforts should also be a call to the older social and business networking sites to add more benefits. I've been seeing a lot of small user interface improvements on Orkut and Linkedin is adding more features to put more control in the hands of the user.

So, overall, I guess it's all great for us, the users :-)