www.tagged.com – Once you’re tagged, you’re it forever! If you join Tagged.com, all your friends will hate you and many will accuse you of relentlessly spamming them with invitations to join.
When you join tagged.com, you reach a screen that asks you if you’d like to find all your friends that are already on the network. You think it’s a nice convenience and you enter your Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email address and password. This is a huge mistake on your part and Tagged makes you pay bigtime!
It seems this social networking site sends an invitation to join Tagged to everyone who’s ever sent or received an email from you. If you get tricked during signup and enter your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account to see if any of your friends are members, it keeps sending them invitations again and again. This viral spamming technique is working well for them and tagged.com is growing rapidly.
Tagged.com received seven million in venture capital, so this is a well-funded and well-planned viral marketing campaign. The only thing they forgot to consider is exactly what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an endless stream of emails saying “so and so” has Tagged you.
Before you know it, all your friends are calling you a “so and so”, albeit in less flattering and more colorful words than that! Tagged is rapidly alienating their user base with this constant spam and users are helpless to stop it.
The infamous Next button of death:Tagged.com next button
Instantly, they retrieve a list of anyone and everyone who has ever sent or received an email from your Gmail account or other email service. Each of them is checked by default. If you click the big red button that says Next without unchecking your contact list, they all get an invitation from you to join Tagged.
However, most people react to a big red button that says Next in the way that they’ve been conditioned to do from years of web surfing. They click it without thinking and the unrelenting spam flood begins.
The only way to stop it is for each individual who receives a Tagged.com invitation to unsubscribe from their mailing list.
Even worse, those that do join from your invitation make the same mistake and the process starts anew with their own list of friends. Here’s what unfortunate member had to say:
god almighty, this web site is cruel. i’ve been apologizing to friends for days now. you log in to the site and it spams everyone you know. a few days later it does it again. this keeps repeating and theres no way to stop it. i hate tagged.com.
Of course, you can always opt out of inviting your friends during the Tagged.com signup process. After all, you haven’t seen the website yet! Here’s how a user described the web site:
Well, seems like spam-your-friends isn’t required for signup because a few minutes later I got a welcome to tagged email. And my is the place full of ads, everything from ‘you have already won!’ to ‘dating service with lotsa hawt chicks who just happen to live close to you’ to ‘fun IE toolbars’ to…. you get the idea. This “social web service” seems like nothing more than a distribution vector for adware and spamware.
So, be warned and alway be careful online. Just say NO to Tagged.com