A sham called hi5

Yesterday, I was going through one of the many orkut-kind of sites, hi5 (www.hi5.com). This site is almost same as Google's orkut in its interface (if not worse) and is trying to expand its network. Such websites are increasing in popularity and even Yahoo is launching one, codenamed 360. I think these websites do not offer much after their initial euphoria. Consider orkut with more than 2 million members now. There was a time when I used to go to orkut every day just to check messages and look at new people's profiles. I have watched orkut grow when it was less than a million network. But now, they are just very slow in opening up the pages, not many messages are sent in the network and its just not interesting anymore.

Anyway, this post is not about orkut or alikes. It is about the cheap practices done by this website hi5. For expanding the network, it provides users with an interface of pulling out contacts from hotmail, yahoo and aol address books. I wanted to look at my hotmail contacts and see who is inside hi5. So, I gave my hotmail login and password to them. The next page shows it is ready to send an invite to everybody that I have ever known in my whole life! All the checkboxes of all contacts are checked and there is one big 'Send' button at the bottom with nothing else on the webpage. No unselect all option. Of course, I do not want to send an invite to everybody. Some of them I have not talked with for years. To cut the long story short, I accidently pressed the "Send" button (maybe because there was no other button to press and move forward and I was in a hurry) and with in a second it showed me that it has sent the invitations to everybody. EVERYBODY. I am not an extrovert kind of guy and maintains some degree of distance with everybody in my real life. Now, I am not sure what each of my contact would think of my virtual life after receiving my such friendly invitation after years.

My grouse with this website are for two things. First of all, why is every contact checked in the first page. It is very cheap to expect that a user would like to send an invite to their (immature) network to everybody. Secondly, there was no confirmation button. Any decent website would ask for confirmation for any step that is taken. Users can unwittingly press 'Enters' on their websites and should therefore be confirmed if they had.

Well, I received acceptances of invites from some of my friends. I also received a response from my PhD advisor that she is no more into these kinds of network after orkut and that she is thankful for getting an invitation. I could not fathom what each of those persons would think. Well, I could only hope that they like that. Atleast, that I remembered them (though admittingly, I did not).