Tagged, you’re it?

I guess the ridiculous nature of “social networking” sites just gets dumber. In an article on Time Magazine’s website titled “Tagged: The World’s Most Annoying Website” spotlights a new “social networking” site named Tagged, and how irritating it is.

Another blogger mentioned snope’s information on Tagged and it pretty much sums up what the article on Time’s site has to say.
http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/Tagged.asp

I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind wants to waste hours upon hours doing nothing but staring at these god awful social networking sites. Not only are they a waste of time, but inevitably most people do and say crap on these sites that they wouldn’t normally do. It’s almost like someone took these people out and got them plastered then took them to a political rally and put them on stage as a keynote speaker. Some of the dumbest crap about people’s personal lives comes out on these sites…not only are they pointless, you will most likely never meet or have a meaningful relationship with your “friends”, but now it seems they are turning into a cheap way to build spam lists. Like we need anymore spam considering ~99% of all email traffic world wide is spam.

So, people, in an attempt to make their imaginary “I’m cool, look at me” world even more expansive, they start signing up for this new site called Tagged. Unfortunately what they don’t realize is this site has actually no content, and is just going to grab all of your IM/email contacts and spam every single one of them (and probably sell their email addresses to other people) with invites regardless if you want it to or not. There’s another site similar to this called “grouply” or some crap. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen emails about “so and so wants you to join xxx”, and it comes from someone I did or do know. The scary thing about grouply is that it asks you for your actual yahoo account name and password to download your contacts. I don’t know who in their right mind would willingly submit that information to some random website in hopes that they will find new and interesting ways to not really connect with their not so real friends on the internet. Honestly, the more crap like this that comes along on the internet the less I want anyone to be able to track me down in real life, or even make anything remotely useful about myself available for public consumption.

According to the article in on Time’s website, during the registration process it pesters you a few times about sending invites out to all your contacts and veils the request in such a way that most people fall for it after having been asked repeatedly. It also seems to just ignore telling it “no”. Honestly, if you’re that stupid to sign up for one  of these websites, please take me out of your address book, burn any information you have about contacting me and forget you even knew me. I don’t want to end up with spam because you’re stupid enough to think that someone collecting email addresses isn’t going to put your contacts on every single email spam list circulating the internet. I stopped giving out my email address to people unless absolutely necessary, because eventually people that don’t work with computers for a living (and some that do) will either get a virus that disseminates all their contacts to the rest of the internet, or they sign up for something stupid like Tagged.

It’s almost like we shouldn’t even be looking at the internet anymore and go back to the good old days of console games and cable TV. A lot less hassle and headaches. There’s something to be said for living a life that’s less intruded upon by having stupid people tell other people all about you without realizing by doing so they make you the target of someone out to annoy you and make money off it.

~ by g0thicicecream on June 11, 2009.