Over at the NY Observer, Jesse Wegman has a big problem with Shelfari, the book-themed social networking site. During his registration, Wegman reports, “I accidentally failed to uncheck the approximately 1,500 names in my Gmail address book that Shelfari had helpfully pre-checked for me, thereby inviting to join Shelfari, under my name (and ostensibly from my e-mail account), every single person with whom I have exchanged an e-mail in the past three years, in addition to every single person who has ever been on the same cc list as I have, regardless of whether we have ever met, in addition to every single listserv I have ever joined and every single Web site from which I have ever ordered anything.”
Having been on the receiving end of about a dozen of those emails—from other people, I hasten to add, not Wegman—I know just how big a pain in the neck it is to get them cluttering up the inbox, and I can empathize with the frustration he feels at having everybody yammer at him for sending them even though he’s not really the one who did it. (Me, I just delete the nasty buggers, and if anybody comes back to me later and apologizes, I nod and make polite murmuring sounds.) I’m not much on social networking sites to begin with, but this was pretty much a dealbreaker for me from the moment I got my first Shelfari spam…