I received and invite to the British-based social networking site, Quechup.com, from Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com. I thought to myself, “Well, I guess I can check it out.” Little did I know that Hugh didn’t mean to send it to me (or the hundreds of others that probably got the same message.)

The e-mail was legitimate - depending on how you look at it.

I went to the site, signed up, and decided to import my contacts from G-Mail. It works the same way MySpace or Facebook does, it checks to see if any of your contacts are already members and then links you with them automatically. Unfortunately I didn’t read the fine print - neither did Hugh. When I entered my info for G-Mail, Quechup decided to send and invite to EVERYONE of my G-Mail contacts. In G-Mail, every person you have ever sent an e-mail to is in your list. I’m guessing many hundreds of people had a Quechup invite in their Inbox from me. I didn’t know until it was WAY too late. The following day I awoke to several e-mails from people asking who I was and why I sent them an invite. I also had e-mails from friends saying they had signed up. It’s been two days since I spammed everyone and I am still trying to clear up the entire mess.

If any of you reading this got an invite, please disregard it. I didn’t mean to send it to all of you.

Beware of Quechup. They received an extremely disgruntled e-mail from me that contained more than one four-letter word. Quechup may be a fine social networking site but their underhanded tactics to gain new members is unethical. I’ll never know because I will never be going back to the site.

Mashable covered the story on the 2nd of this month.  Too bad I didn’t check my RSS reader that day.

Filed under: Blogging, F.Y.I., Internet, Lessons Learned, Social Networks, Tips