identified.com: Likely not worth your time

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:06:02 GMT

So identified.com came to my attention today because it is sending email, gradually, to every email address and mailing list at MIT. I am still on a number of mailing lists at MIT, including some that haven't been used in many years, and they are all getting email in alphabetical order. (Does anyone know what sh-leech-wrestling@mit.edu was even for?? I am pretty sure I never wrestled any leeches.) Now, most likely what happened is that they set up an automatic mailer, and set up a webform so that people could invite their friends to the service over the web just by sending some sort of automated HTTP request, and then some "clever" MIT undergraduate who just discovered that you could get a list of every mailing list on campus [0] bashed together some sort of script in order to send requests to all of them in turn. Nice, nice, good for you kidlet, you have a bright future in being a dick.

I found the company on twitter and sent them a message saying "Hey, you probably want to turn that off." Now, this company brands itself on experts on social networking, and their blog is all about how to not screw up on social networking and thereby not be able to get a job. This is hilarious, because according to gossip this service is apparently their product launch. To add insult to injury, when I tweeted at them, I didn't get any real response --- not super unsurprising, business hours are over on the east coast and almost over in California --- but I got an automated email to the email address associated with my twitter account, with the subject "Rachel, when companies search for you, what do they find?" It was HTML email (not multipart! Just HTML!) and was an invite for me to join them so they could help me because "Companies and professionals are evaluating you on Facebook." So they run a spam gateway, mentioning them on Twitter gets you added to a marketing database, and they're trying to tell me how to come across professionally?

Well, Identified, if anyone's trying to evaluate me on Facebook, they won't have much luck, since I don't have a facebook. But if someone's trying to evaluate you, now they'll find this blog post. Cheers. Luckily for you, I don't care about SEO.

Edited to add: They responded as follows: "@raxvulpine It seems a single MIT email address was synced and our software wasn't written for MIT's list serve system. Emails are off." On the one hand, it's nice of them to apologize, on the other hand, blaming it on "MIT's list serve system" demonstrates either that they don't understand what's going on or that they don't think that I understand what's going on. It's hard to tell in 140 characters; hopefully they get it fixed. And then I never hear from them again.

Edited again to add: I heard privately about what happened; it's not quite what I expected but it's also not "MIT's list serve system." It's super embarrassing for them, but it's not public information, so I will leave it at that. On the plus side, it's definitely fixed.

[0] Pretty sure there's a qy invocation for this; you might even just be able to do it with stella. I think it's stella? It's been a long time.

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identified.com: Likely not worth your time