Prateek Dayal

I tried importing my gmail address book into Facebook today using their friend finder and it showed me about 500 contacts that I can add as friends. I scanned the whole list and selected contacts that I know well and hit the invite button. In the summary, I was shown about thousand extra contacts (including some mailing lists, some old university addresses) that the invitation were sent to. I got some 5 invitations myself, sent to different email aliases I have. I don’t even remember seeing those email addresses (including my own aliases) in the list of contacts shown to me.

I wonder why a company like Facebook has such a misleading invitation mechanism. When Facebook says that you have X contacts that you can add as friend and shows their photo next to their names, anyone would assume that these are people already on Facebook. Turns out a lot of these people are not on Facebook and there is no separate list of contacts who are not on FB, but can be invited (which is a common two step invitation practice followed by sites like Twitter/LinkedIn etc).

If you have received an invite to join Facebook from me, please accept my apologies and ignore it. I did not mean to send even a single invite. I have never even invited all my contacts to Muziboo, my own startup so I particularly hate being labeled as a spammer when FB spams on my behalf.  Thanks so much FB for breaching my trust!

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Tags: addressbook, facebook, friend finder

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 5:18 am and is filed under facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.