Chapter 3: Meet “the world’s most annoying Web site”{0}
The Fortune Brainstorm Tech area of CNNMoney.com published an article entitled Meet “the world’s most annoying Web site”. It is about the social networking site Tagged.com. The article highlights how New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo plans to sue this social networking site for false advertising, deceptive business, and identity theft.
Tagged.com is much like any other social networking site, except for it’s emphasis on meeting strangers (instead of existing friends) and it’s questionable spreading tactics. Cuomo describes the site as tricking people into giving out their contact lists and issuing invitations to join Tagged.com. It gives out sort of personal ads. One of the practices is to send out a message to the contacts of a current Tagged member with the invitation to view “photos” and other things. The requirement for viewing is that one must join Tagged. The problem is that it isn’t photos that Tagged sends out, but Tags (icons that describe a person).
Tagged has used it’s tactics to become the third largest social networking site, claiming 80 million registered users. This relates to the text in that it is an example of a disruptive technology. It is essentially a new way of doing things. It is using spam tactics to gain more users for a social networking site. It did not really meet the needs of existing customers in the beginning as it dropped out of favor to sites like Facebook and MySpace. It then employed it’s new tactics to gain a foothold on the market and compete with the existing technologies.
Atal, M. (2009). Meet “the world’s most annoying Web site”, CNNMoney.com Fortune
Brainstorm Tech. Retrieved September 9, 2009, from
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/07/meet-the-worlds-most-
annoying-website/