LinkedIn's sleazy invite tactics

The other day I popped on to LinkedIn to look at a profile and there was an input for my email and password, which I thought was weird as I thought I was logged in. Anyways, I entered my password and email again and hit OK. Well it turns out this was an import from contacts box that they just happened to make look very much like a login. Anyhow on the first screen it prompted me to invite some folks so I selected 3 of them and hit ok, thinking I was done that, I hit ok again accidentally, and low and behold, it emailed every single person that I had ever emailed. We are talking clients, co-workers, friends, even kids who had sent in support requests for one of our games. Now - I probably deserve some blame for not paying enough attention, but at the same point, why would you dress up some major function like this to look like a login box. So that was bad. But what is worse, it decided without asking me, to send yet another batch reminding people who had not signed up and there is no apparent way to turn this off. Anyhow, be warned. Not sure if this is worse than them defaulting to using your photos in ads

what is bad is you using the same password for your email and linkedin account!!

I had to report LinkedIn as spam in gmail because no amount of unsubscribing would stop them from spamming me. I have an account already but they refuse to leave me alone about it. Their tactics for most things are just sleazy. They only see their users as ways of getting more users. I'm not a fan. Although I still have an account, so I guess I'm not that upset.

LinkedIn should thank gmail for having such a good spam filter. Without it, they probably would have lost me as a user. :)

Have you noticed post-IPO and post acquisition products start to suck? Huffington Post used to be a favorite, until AOL took over. LinkedIn is turning into a spam machine.

Yeah, my dad has spent the last few days incandescent with rage at a system which (presumably via deceptive opt in) seems to have emailed everyone he's ever been involved in email correspondence with, which he thinks includes a number of people on cc chains he doesn't even know.

So basically, instead of welcoming someone who fits smack bang in the middle of their ideal demographic (self-employed professional with specialist expertise and a lot of old contacts but no time or inclination to go to networking events) they've got a phantom account with over 100 connections but no intention of using the service ever again.

I remember another site that grew very big on this invite model. AOL wasted half a billion on Bebo.

Time to start shorting their stock whilst reporting their emails as spam.