Recently, I was trying to import some contacts from Gmail to YouTube. After going through a Plaxo dialog to select all my contacts, I assumed the next step would be to see who of those contacts were on YouTube. I thought wrong, in stead the service has e-mailed every address I imported (almost 200) an invitation to connect with me without my explicit consent.
Naturally, I’m quite upset about the whole situation and have decided to at least offer my apologies for bothering anyone with this spam. If you’ve received a YouTube invitation from frog1980 and thought it was inappropriate, I’m very sorry to have unwontedly bothered you.
Also, I hope someone of YouTube reads this and will make it a point to reconsider the way importing contacts works. Spamming my friends without my consent is not a cool thing to do.
Update: I’ve just notified YouTube of the issue too, here’s the message I sent them:
I was just disappointed that after registering myself I found out that you did not have any videos to share with me after all!
Wow, the upside of all this is that 14 people have accepted my “invitation”. I’ve added them all to my friends list (including you Ed) so now they can enjoy a video of my awesome Takeda Ryu iaido jiyugata.
Another update: YouTube replied to my message
quitequickly, but the contents were quite disappointing:Followed by a long list of FAQs. I replied of course, to see if they take the user experience of their site seriously. Here we go:
Today I received another mail from YouTube. This one purportedly contains the “solution”:
I give up. If anyone notices changes in their import contacts function (for better or worse), let me know.
“Stay tuned as the service is continually getting better based on the feedback we receive from the community.”
So more people need to complain and/or deliver YouTube a solution? Sounds like they believe in this newfangled Web2.0 user-created content idea, including applying it to their FAQ’s…