Ghost friends at StumbleUpon.Too bad!

A few weeks ago, Tadeusz Szewczyk stumbled and reviewed one of my posts. Immediately after that, I received a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon users. Such a thing has never happened to me before. When it comes to traffic from social networking sites, BlogCatalog has always been my main supplier of traffic because I have a number of great friends that side. But, as of now, StumbleUpon has overtaken BlogCatalog by far. As a result, these days, I like spending more of my leisure time stumbling than ever before. And every day, I make more and more StumbleUpon friends, some of whom are top stumblers. You can take a look at my StumbleUpon page, if time is on your side. If you have not yet joined StumbleUpon, I encourage you to join and install their tool bar on your PC. Add me as a friend, if you can. Start enjoying the world of social browsing.

Yesterday, I exchanged messages with caile-girl who is a top stumbler. In one of the messages, she told me that she would have loved to add me as her friend but she can’t just because she has reached the StumbleUpon limit of 200. But she went on to say that there are 24 ghost friends (people who were mutual friends who no longer have SU accounts anymore) in her network and she cannot replace them with live friends like me. She further said that this problem has been going on for a very long time such that most stumblers who have been on StumbleUpon for a long time experience it in varying degrees. This is too bad for a dynamic and addictive social browsing platform of StumbleUpon’s caliber. Can someone at StumbleUpon, please, rectify this anomaly now! It is seemingly small things like these that put off members:(. Do not get surprised when some folks start their own StumbleUpon clone. Go and ask Digg! They now have to battle for members with Mixx.

Comments are welcome. Remember that this is a Do-Follow blog. Today, I am traveling to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, for a funeral so I will be outa here. I will only come back on Monday to take a look at your wonderful comments and reply to them. God bless you all :)

The Quechup spam

Last week, Jeremy Miller sent me an invite to join Quechup.com. My immediate thought was that he was returning a favor to me because a few weeks ago, I sent him a pownce invite (I am glad he joined and now he is one of my pownce friends). In light of this, I quickly went to the Quechup site and signed up for their service. After signing up, they offered to check my contacts to see if anyone else I knew was already on the service. This is not uncommon in the world of social networking, because Facebook, Myspace and many other networks do it in the same way, so I agreed.I entered my gmail info just like I did when I joined facebook a few weeks ago.

Quechup has now sent emails to everyone of in my gmail address book inviting them to join Quechup in my name. Now, my mailbox is being filled up with Quechup friend alerts from all over the world. Some people are even asking me why I invited them. Therefore, I would like to ask everyone who has received an invite to join Quechup from me to please ignore it.Please accept my profound apologies for subjecting you to these spam bandits. If you did sign up, please delete your account forthwith because you never know what these guys are going to do next.

If you have just noticed these messages in your mailbox, please delete them. If you have been used to Quechup-spam other people already, please do not send out multiple messages of apology to all your address book contacts, because that, in itself, might be construed as spam by gmail, yahoo and other mail giants out there. You account might be disabled just like Matt Staggs, who after being tricked by Quechup.com ended up sending all his contacts an apology. This resulted in an email blast which has caused Google to suspend his Gmail account.

As pointed out by Jeremy, Quechup may be a fine social networking site but their underhanded tactics to gain new members is unethical.