First Gazzag, now Tagged & Facebox

The site www.tagged.com is a new social networking site. I haven't been tracking on its popularity, but the site claims to be the fastest growing teen social community on the Internet. From the corporate information available on the site,

Tagged.com is the premier social networking destination for the Millennial Generation and an ideal place for advertisers who are trying to reach the teen market.

OK, so that tells me (and my friends) to stay away from the site.. we've not been teen-agers for quite some time now. But there are bigger problems with this site than that.

A few months back, I had written the articles de-gazzaging my inbox and more on gazzag about a popular web nuisance that called itself Gazzag. I think tagged.com is just another example of such Internet annoyances. Let's walk through tagged.com's registration process to see why:

Step 1
OK, here's the website. It does look a whole lot uglier on Internet Explorer with some nasty banner advertisements. Anyway, let's create a new account on this.

Step 2
Yep, filled in my details. But take a look at something that I've done - I specified my date of birth as the 31st of February, 1978. Not only did the website allow the non-existent date, it didn't reject me because even though I am not a teenager. I'm wondering what happened to their tagline of being a teen social community.

Step 3

Whoa! Give me a minute.. why does Tagged.com want my hotmail password?!? Yep, one reason only - to get my addressbook, so that it can spam all of my friends with invitations to Tagged.com. Another example of viral marketing in which the existing users don't get a say in who gets contacted. What's more, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to get around this screen. I guess the naïve user would not look to bypass this screen and simply provide their hotmail password. While I didn't check if the tagged.com guys have devised mechanism to import contacts from yahoo and gmail, I won't be surprised if they have.

The same problem exists on the website facebox.com, another social networking site. When you register on this, there does not appear to be any way to create your account without importing contacts from your e-mail address books.


But if you click on the "by email address" option, you'd get the option to bypass this step:

Nasty, isn't it?

Let me re-iterate what I had written earlier about gazzag and other sites that ask for e-mail passwords:

... The tool that allows one to import contacts from yahoomail & orkut requires one to enter the username and password of those sites. And a lot of my friends, including a few tech savvy ones, have done exactly that. My question is why??

Would you trust me with your yahoomail password? I think not, I hope not. Then why would one trust gazzag or any other site asking for your yahoomail password? ...

Tagged & facebox are just a few more site that are trapping users into sharing their addressbooks. But the point is that it could get worse.. what if someone in Tagged.com's office is reading your e-mail? Their privacy policy will probably mention that they won't - but how do you know they're going to stand by that? Anyways, the next time a site asks you for your hotmail/gmail password, please think about if you'd like to share your password with me.

If you've sent me a tagged or a facebox or a gazzag invitation recently, I hope you'll understand why I've not responded.