DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for November 5th, 2009

An open apology to to all the people that I have annoyed through Netlog in the last few weeks…

I’d like to apologise to a few hundred people and to give a warning to the rest of you. As many of you will know, I have an active interest in social media so when I caught wind of a new playground for the early adopters in social media, it piqued my interest.

It’s well known that the social media platforms follow the traditional product lifecycle. I suspect Facebook is constantly trying to keep things fresh to avoid becoming another myspace and recoup its substantial investment. The new waves of digital natives are looking for a place to play away from an environment where you mum and your grandmar can throw sheep at you in an effort to remain ‘cool’. I heard that place was netlog.com.

Before you rush over there and reserve your username as I did, I’d urge you to read to the end of my post because this seriously backfired for me.

On a very busy day, I looked up netlog and created a short profile, just enough to reserve a username and get a general feel for what this new platform might look like. It was really easy to join and the layout was fresh and inviting, but on first glances, it didn’t offer anything new. You can do all the same things that you can do on the more popular networks.

So my thoughts went along the lines of “maybe I’m missing something, this is a social network so maybe I need to chat with a few people to see what the fuss is about’

I clicked the conveniently places icon that allowed me to check for people I knew by connecting to my gmail account. I entered my private email account details and proceeded to the next screen which told me something like, ‘we’ve just invited your entire address book to join you on netlog’.

‘Sorry what was that?!’

‘Is this some kind of joke?’

I quickly checked my gmail and found a barrage of out office replies, bounces and helpdesk ticket notifications. Disaster!  You see if you have ever sent me an email, even if your an automated helpdesk, then your in my address book and I want to make friends with you (according to netlog anyway)

I’m now in damage control, posting updates and tweats about ignoring my emails. To make matters worse, netlog then sends out round after round of reminders. I once had a friend who sent me these emails from bebo and it annoyed me no end. Now I was on the other end.

A few weeks later I spent quite a while trawling through the setting of my netlog account, trying to find ways to cancel these requests but can’t find anything. Along the way I found a nice help page telling me that netlog respects your privacy and didn’t send the email without consent. This might even be true, but i suspect the consent part was in the small print. The fact that this page is there in  the first place is evidence that I’m not alone in my frustration.

That’s just about done it for me. If they wont allow me to retract the requests, then I’ll leave. This turns out to be a task in itself but eventually I find out how to leave netlog.

Tip: the process step if cleverly hidden in the layout of the linked page. Clever use of layout here netlog! no big sheny buttons and a call to actions for deleting your account I see.

Some conclusions : It’s evident from this whole experience that starting  a new social network needs a very aggressive approach and the space must be very competitive. Whilst I suspect that the sign up and leaving process on the site were compliant, I’ve now left netlog. It’s left very bitter taste in my mouth and I’m unlikely to go back.

Netlog have, for obvious reasons made it easy to join and grow your network and difficult to leave but the cost that I suspect they don’t realise is that they have upset almost everyone I know on my email account in the process.

Is this tactic really likely to work for them in the long term? Do these automated emails annoy you too?