Me and My Muse

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Gazzag - what lies behind

Why I am not on gazzag.com and why I’ll never ever join it?

On the whole, the site seems extremely nasty and intrusive. I had made a promise never to visit the site ever until my girlfriend asked me to delete her account, highly irritated by spamming and not being able to find the "terminate account" link (the way these guys had hidden the option to delete account is a different story)

And here's what I observed:

  1. The sign-up process does not need an invitation. Anyone can join in, without any restrictions. The sign-up process does not even have a CAPTCHA system to trap bots. So one can expect a larger number of bot-generated fake profiles on this site.
  2. There are tools to automatically import contacts from orkut, yahoomail, Multiply, MSN Messenger, Outlook & Outlook Express. Imagine if you import your Outlook contacts at your workplace and your CEO receives a Gazzag invitation from you. That'd be fun, eh?
  3. There are ads all over the place - a combination of graphics, Google-generated text-ads, and those irritating pop-ups (I deliberately used Internet Explorer to see what the majority Internet users' experience would be like). Of course, Firefox & adblock would be able to clean most of this in a jiffy.
  4. One of the features that Gazzag is trying to market big-time is the live chat - one can chat with anyone who's logged on to the website. Either that's really useful, or really irritating.
  5. Gazzag Dating - this is a site within Gazzag, name explains all. A gazzag in itself.

Now, a slightly tangential line of thought. The tool that allows one to import contacts from yahoomail & orkut requires one to enter the username and password of those sites. And a lot of my friends, including a few tech savvy ones, have done exactly that. My question is why??

Would you trust me with your yahoomail password? I think not, I hope not. Then why would one trust gazzag or any other site asking for your yahoomail password?

I'm sure there are tons more that can be added to this list. There has been a lot more things like this Myspace - Friendster - Zorpia - Hi5 - Zanga – Namesdatabase - etc - etc .. but no one, no one, seemed to get on my nerves like gazzag.com

Update

Gazzag accounts could be deleted. And yes, I did find these instructions:
Select the "Welcome" option in the main menu.
Select the "Account Settings" option in the submenu.
Select the "Terminate Account" option.

-A

http://arnabpal.blogspot.com

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