I received an invitation to a "social network" software from India not long time ago.
I always subcribe to these software at least to check what are they capable of. I also like to observe the Darwinian evolution of software.
This software made me upset right in the first turn. It didn't harvest my relationships organically like FACEBOOK but it wanted to record my relationships using my Gmail contacts by borrowing my Gmail password. I didn't have any other choice if I wanted to see the web-app running, however borrowing my Gmail password was very suspicious to me. In the next step it enlisted all my Gmail contacts. There was a tiny checkbox to send the invitation to all of them or not. I didn't want to invite anybody to this social network, all I wanted to do is to check what it offers. Therefore I've unchecked the checkbox and went to the next page. Well... The service didn't offer me any excepcionally good quality. It was nothing to learn. So it didn't worth borrowing my precious Gmail password. For the sake of security I changed my Gmail password promptly.
I was surprized when many of my friends sent me a message in the next few days that they don't want to subscribe to this at all, nevertheless I unchecked the invitation checkbox. There were some of them who thought that this software is a VIRUS. Well I've unregistered myself from this "social networking" immediately.
Well... This happens when a software harvests its users in an agressive manner rather than adapting the strategy to grow organically. The problem with it is that even sometimes even those people will be harvested who are not even my friends (I send them only one or two email messages in my whole life). So my "social network" will contain some foreign people to.
This precious information is now free and available for everyone, thanks to these softwares. But sometimes they also contain false relationships :)
