You see a lot of discussion about the ethics of data privacy and portability, but what about the ethics of virality?
Specifically, what about sites like Hi5, that use heavy handed tactics to increase their virality?
I love time saving techniques such as one-click registration processes and instant portability, i.e. sites which port to your existing email, messenger, and social network accounts, automatically importing all of your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Orkut, and MSN contacts.
It saves the user the time of trying to figure out how to import the information, or worse yet, the tedium of having to enter the information manually.
From a user-experience standpoint, this adds a great deal of value.
But, to use these same techniques to spam a user's entire contact list, with an aim towards increasing the site's own membership--is to destroy any benefit to user-experience the site gained by providing the tools in the first place.
If I like a product or service, I will recommend it to my friends.
But sites like Hi5 apparently do not have much faith in their users.
By making 'invite all' the default setting and instantly sending unsolicited emails to everyone on a user's contact list, before a prospective user has even had the chance to explore a site, they are destroying any good will they engendered by providing the tools and, more importantly, making the overall user-experience a bad one.
Attention Entrepreneurs:
When faced with a choice between user-experience and virality, always choose user-experience!!!!
I would counsel Hi5 and other sites guilty of using such practices to have more faith in their users.
If you create a great product or service and make it easy for users to tell their friends about it, they will.
But using heavy handed techniques to hijack a user's social graph is bad user-experience and, at least in my opinion, unethical.
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