When a well respected blogger such as Damien comes along and complains about spam from a local startup, you know that there really is a story here.
Damien said “I only used my “run[at]coda.co.za” e-mail alias to sign up for two half marathon’s and a trail series that I participated in this year.” He received a spam email, on this very private email address, from someone at Blueworld inviting him to come and join in.
The spam message was posted to muti and quickly climbed to the top position, so clearly the local folk are not going to take this lightly, could this go as far as Blueworld being made an example of?! I reserve my opinion, I’m open to someone explaining it and I’m not convinced that it is definitely a spam attempt, I’ll give Blueworld the benefit of the doubt – but it’s not looking good :(
I wrote a post about protecting your email address against spam and it would appear that we do need to look out for our email addresses, appears that not only International people are spamming, but even the local scene :/
Let’s hope that it’s a mistake, it’s a scary thought to think that 24.com is involved in spamming!
Is news24 the same group? I busted them the other day using a photograph of mine in one of their articles:
http://www.southafrica.to/transport/Airlines/Nationwide-flights/2008/News24-busted.php5
ohhhh yes, blueworld is doing the spam thing in a BAD way. I’ve received many, many so called invites from this “J-Princess” fake profile crap, its piss annoying! go away already !
South Africa, I think they’re all powered by the same power house as far as I know, but I stand to be corrected. I remember your article bud!!!
Anonymous – Why would you not state who you are? :(
As I said on Muti – BlueWorld isn’t a smallish community project anymore. It’s got backing from 24.com, which unfortunately now has some say in Blueworld operations.
The race for dominance is ugly, and if they can’t attract their users by viral marketing or adwords, they might just try email spam, and finally, some sort of Facebook viral app. Last I checked, 24.com wanted to establish Blueworld over Facebook in SA. I think it’s fair to assume that’s still their goal.
Wogan, we all know that 24.com has taken over the company, but what most people don’t know is how they’ve done it and how the operational side of things are handled..
What are your feelings on spam though, are you for it or against it?
I constantly receive group invites from random women on blueworld. The pictures look fake and they seem like screen captures from videos. I never logon, post any pictures, blogs or anything. How do they find me and why?
@ihategroupinvites – That’s the thing, someone is obviously selling our email addresses and then someone else is purchasing them and spamming us :/
Haha. Imod you are such a hypocrite. You have that “subscribe to this comments” thing ticked at the bottom of the comment, and you don’t even tell people what it is. If that’s not bad enough you will probably send me an email saying “Thanks for commenting”. Ha!
So should i start blogging about that?
Foxinni, if you followed my blog on a more regular basis, you would know that I conducted a survey asking my readers whether they’d like that feature added, the conclusion was that they did. Secondly, in a recent thread, it was outlined that people wanted it removed, so you can see that it has been changed and added under the textarea with an explanation. This is hardly the same thing bud.
I realise you are defending the company you work for, which is fair enough and if you actually read my post you’ll see this.. “I reserve my opinion, I’m open to someone explaining it and I’m not convinced that it is definitely a spam attempt, I’ll give Blueworld the benefit of the doubt”. Furthermore, I went on to say “Let’s hope that it’s a mistake”.
I did not accuse Blueworld of spamming, I merely questioned it based on others opinions in the blogsphere. The fact that the top two posts on muti are related to this, shows that people are curious, hence me blogging it.
Be fair here, I never accused, I questioned..
Hey Fox, what’s this.. http://www.imod.co.za/webcam/foxinni-thank-you.jpg ;)
Thanks for using my “Contact Me” Chris.
I’m not saying you’re accusing BW of spamming. But you’re making BW look bad by writing blog posts with the title: “24.com powering Blueworld by spamming?”. A question mark does not make it less of a statement. Anyway, I’m bored by this. Digg here I come.
@Chris I’d say I’m not entirely against “spam”. I’ve got nothing against once-off emails about new and interesting sites or services that I might want to learn about. For those of us who use Gmail’s Archive feature, we know just how easy it is to make those emails go away. You can’t honestly say they cause that much of a distraction or inconvenience, can you?
I do have a problem with repeated, pointless emails like them viagra ones. I consider those to be “spam”. I’d classify Blueworld’s invites as UCE – has a benificial point to it, even if the recipient never asked for it.
@Foxinni Dude, chill, lol.
@Fox – I’m glad we had a chance to chat on Skype and clear things up. iMod is all about Cape Town, technology, industry news and all that, hence the post, the idea was not to accuse Blueworld, but rather try and find out more about the situation :)
@Wogan – Interesting you feel like that. Personally, I am against spam, every day I deal with a huge collection of spam emails and quite frankly, they annoy the hell out of me, perhaps it’s just me. Repeated spam is just a whole other story, that’s the cherry on the top :)
Fox is just flaming, we’ve chatted, all is good :)
@ChrisM I suppose I just suffer from hyperconnectivity. I recently found I have fairly lucid memory for completely irrelevant details, so I generally tend to make use of that :)
Ok, time to get employed.
I have invites as well… foxinni reaction makes us think they did it. And if you search you get this
http://www.muti.co.za/comments?sbid=21630
Inflating numbers to report to shareholders…?
“What a Blue Monday! We just want to come out and apologize for sending the Blueworld invite to a private email addresses. We want to tell people about our service and use one of our top users ‘J-Princess’ as the face of Blueworld.
We are obviously very excited to share our product which is getting better and better all the time with the market and used the wrong channels to market it.” – the Blueworld team.
“It’s a case of overzealous entrepreneurialism on the part of the Blueworld guys and we would like to end this activity here.
24.com was definitely not aware of the action in question but are confident from our referral sources that this is not how Blueworld is growing.
The guys are great guys and have no bad intentions. They love their brand and wanted to tell people about it – but have learned that there are rules
to play by and that being associated to a big media company brings attention to every action. We have many plans and budget to grow Blueworld this year and these do not include any wrong doing – particularly spamming people. This is not how we do business. We would like to put this behind us and look to a bright future.
24.com has built a great online business in the SA market over the past 9 years through fair-play and we are proud of this fact. Our values will not tolerate these tactics and we would like to end this issue here. It has been an important learning experience for the guys.
We are still very happy with the investment choice in Blueworld. The guys have a fantastic product and we should have no problem continuing to grow through legitimate channels.”
* Elan Lohmann, General Manager of Social Networking and Media at 24.com (24.com owns a majority share of Blueworld Communities)
(feel free to contact me elan.lohmann (at) SA.24.com
I’m with Wogan on this all the way! In all fairness, Damien has the full right to complain about this, but also he has the option of being removed (unsubscribe) if so prompted by the email sent from Blueworld. If Blueworld does not give one the option to unsubscribe, I personally think it becomes an issue.
Spam is the most overhyped word in the industry and some people should first dig into the meaning behind spam as a whole before slamming judgments on one of SA’s most successful local start-ups.
UCE in my personal opinion does not effect the most part of internet users and does not even closely compare to real “spam”!
“Enlarge your penis. – click here”
“Purchase Viagra FREE shipping worldwide – 95% off”
“Make a million dollars in just 30 seconds”
and thats not even to mention these Nigerian Email scam attempts which REALLY AFFECT people! – I have an email addie that receives hundreds of these, kid you not. enough to make me go haywire on a Monday morning knowing that the 26 out of 113 emails I am busy downloading, I’ll have to sift through and only 5 or so will be solicited.
UCE can’t possibly do too much damage to anyone, infact some of them has been quite interesting over time which I found very useful.
Besides, Blueworld has a function to import your email list and invite your friends. My Gmail has over 80 contacts and Outlook over 300. Even outlook has a function to “auto add contact”, so common sense should also prevail that if “peter” emails me and requests to set up a meeting and I in turn add my contact list to Blueworld, Peter will also get an email from them.
UCE is not quite internet prostitution and I think it’s important to understand the difference between the latter and “spam” in order to conclude this argument.
Instead of slamming the cuffs on Blueworld, I think users that utilize the platform and send invites to friends, should be the ones to be more careful as to whom they invite.
Interesting post Chris, love to hear other opinions on this.
This is very cool of you guys to be so open about this subject. To come out and apologize shows real character and I think Blueworld’s audience will only grow because of their passion for the industry.
We all make wrong decisions from time to time, but do we always own up to them…?
Big Up to Charl/Elan and the team, just once again shows what good of character our local boys have!
subject concluded. :)
Here we go again
@ anonymous:
“I’ve received many, many so called invites from this “J-Princess” fake profile crap, its piss annoying! go away already !”
Just wanna let it be known that my profile isn’t FAKE…
what a silly comment… had you taken the time to look before jumping to conclusions you’d have picked that up.
Go Jade!
Well, the thing is.. Jade’s remarks are neither here nor there, it has been admitted by Blueworld that the messages were spam related. Furthermore, ‘anonymous’ received a number of messages and not just one. Whether the J-Princess account is real or not, is completely irrelevant, spam emails were still being sent out under it – simple.
Good on you Chris for raising this. I’m sure you’ve been given a really hard time about this, but that’s only because the truth hurts, mind you.. you didn’t accuse them nor did you source this whole situation.
~ A fellow industry blogger.
Errrm – I was just supporting a friend, after someone claimed that the profile was fake.
Accusations were made in haste.
I am here to confirm that Jade is as real as it gets.
I respect that you have an opinion. I do not respect you giving a piece of your mind and not your name.
Comments are reserved for the brave. Come back when you have a name.
/end emo rant
Zubeir, I never intended my comment at you in a negative/bashing manner, apologies! I was just merely pointing out that anonymous received a number of spammy emails, that’s all. The account being fake or not really plays no role.
Please excuse me for not displaying my name, it could have huge consequences if I did, respect me for that please.