Please Stop Offering the Spam Your Friends Feature

January 1st, 2005

Please, for the love of God, anybody who’s thinking about implementing the next web2.0 or social website, do NOT include a “tell your friend” feature.

I’m so tired of getting the “XXX wants to be your friend”, “YYY wants you to join this website”, “here’s that picture i took of you last weekend, but you gotta join this site to see it”, and “ZZZ has invited you to be a member of” type emails.

I’ve recieved 70 of them since 1am when I went to bed, and 8:00 am when I opened up my email.

MySpace, it’s time we stop making it a competition to gather friends. Take away that little “Ryan has 21 friends” message, and don’t tell me how many friends I have.

That will stop all the little kids from adding complete strangers and accepting the friend invites from 40 year olds too. Kids judge each other by how many friends they have. Take that away and there won’t be any incentive to add people they don’t know.

Won’t that make the web better for everybody?

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