It's a shame the author didn't make a more general warning not to give your email password to a site you didn't know about 30 seconds earlier. Until people start protecting their passwords, they are bound to get taken advantage of like this.
Wow, after about 10 seconds I'd vote time.com to be the world's 2nd most annoying website. For some bizarre reason it kept forcing my scroll back to the top of the page (safari 4), making it impossible to read the article.
I interviewed with them, and let them know I was concerned about the reputation they were starting to develop, partly over the same issue. That was two years ago.
I briefly had a job with these idiots (for one month in 2005). The whole thing was conceived as a way to gather addresses for one of the largest spam operations in North America, which the FTC subsequently shut down.
"But I've been burned, so here's my advice: If you get any kind of message from Tagged, delete it. Avoid the site altogether."<p>Hear. Hear. Nothing but junk on that site, and annoyance for your friends.
I received three of these from one client. I especially loved the warning that "You have to click!"<p>Of course, I knew that I didn't have to do any such damned thing. But I wonder what threat Grandma imagined looming over her if she didn't click either of the options in the e-mail?
This is one of those situations where you evaluate who sent you the invite. My aunt who can barely figure out her Macbook: don't click on it. Cool friend who knows tech: click on it. Guess which one invited me to Tagged?
What does it say about me that I haven't (yet) received a single Tagged email in the past 4-1/2 years (assuming Gmail search is working), unless they got shunted off to spam folder (which doesn't have any, currently)?
I am sad that they do this in a website with over 70 million monthly visits! Greed.<p>Lesson learned: If you are bad in the beginning, you will continue to be bad even after you are successful.
Why does the article call them "Harvard math majors"? They're both physics guys. In fact are both are Ph.D students in the Stanford physics department.
I'm confused. How did tagged get his contact list? If he's dumb enough to enter his username and password from gmail or whatever into some spam of the week website, then its his fault.<p>Or does tagged get that information some other way, like a partnership with yahoo or something?