Yaari = Spam: Note to Emerging Social Networking Sites, This is Bad
Social Networks continue to pop up at quite a clip. The newest one to catch my attention was Yaari – the India-based social network. I received an invite from someone I respect and thought I’d check Yaari out. I went to the site, gave an email address and password.
Everyone in my Gmail address book knows what happened next because you received an invite to Yaari anyway. My apologies to all who Yaari spammed on my behalf.
Of course, I was embarrassed and mad and conveyed as much on Twitter and FriendFeed. Today, I received a note from Yaari CEO, Prerna Gupta. She wrote, “…By registering for Yaari and agreeing to the Terms of Service, you authorized Yaari to send an email notification to all the contacts listed in the address book of the email address you provided during registration. This is clearly stated in our Terms of Service and on the Registration Page.”
Yaari does in fact note this in the fine print in a tiny, gray font at the bottom of the registration page. You can see how I missed it.
Shame on me for not reading the fine print in the footer, but there is a bigger issue here. You don’t grow your site, social network, etc. – no matter what it is – by tricking users into inviting their friends. If you build a valuable service, they will do so on their own. The key here is to be compelling, or interesting, or valuable, etc. and people will find you.
Lead with the product, not the marketing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t encourage your users to invite their friends to your site. By all means, make your site as viral as you can. But, there is a line and Yaari has clearly crossed it.
According to the note, Yaari will – at some as yet undefined point in the future – change its TOS and will no longer notify your entire your address book when you sign up. I, however, will not be back to Yaari to test that promise. As an emerging web destination, you get one chance to win the hearts and minds of your users. Breaching that trust right out of the gate sets a terrible tone going forward, that is assuming you get any users to go forward.
