Mustard, no Quechup

My old friend Ellis Booker writes about being caught up in the messy effort by Quechup to make its social network grow more rapidly. He complains about being turned into a spammer by the service, which automatically emails all your contacts in gmail and (I think) other email programs, evoking a fin de siecle virus. But the service apparently tells you this and you agree to it, if, as with most of us, you don’t read the fine print of software agreements. I would’ve skipped that part, too, and spammed all my contacts, if not for feeling antisocial — I was invited by the same friend who invited Ellis to join the network, but skipped it because I felt like having somewhere between one and two dozen social networks was a bit much.

Then I started getting invited by multiple people, and figured that there was something fishy with Quechup. But any social network is probably not that far away from such behavior.