Your school chum's not asking about you: Classmates.com sued

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me
I'm going to go and eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, little itty bitty ones
See how the big ones squirm
First you bite thier heads off
Then you suck the juice out
Then you throw the skins away
Nobody knows how I can thrive
On worms three times a day.

Did you sing that, or something like it, at school, when you thought no one was your friend?

Well, guess what -- in spite of advertising by some social networking sites, they're still not your friends.

Your school chum's not asking about you: Classmates.com sued:

San Diego resident Anthony Michaels had been a free member of Classmates.com since last year. However, the site—like dating sites that offer paid membership tiers—doesn't let you do anything all that interesting with the free tier. In order to see who has been looking at your profile and read messages from other members, users must first upgrade to a Gold Membership. That's when Michaels said he was tricked. He said that he began receiving messages from Classmates.com claiming that old classmates of his had been looking at his profile and trying to get in touch with him through the site. If only he would fork over some cash for a paid membership, he could see those messages and reconnect with that old high school crush!

Who could resist such a temptation? Michaels couldn't, and that's why he finally paid up in hopes of reading all those messages that his classmates had been sending him. Upon doing so and logging in, however, he was greeted with crushing disappointment. Not a single message was waiting for him in his Classmates.com inbox, and none of the people who had been viewing his profile were ones he knew or was familiar with.

Clasmates.com is not the only or even the worst of such sites. There is also the Names Database, and Alumni.net, and several others. Many of them practice sneaky advertising of one kind or another. The Names Database, for example, offers to give you some of the interesting information, provided you give them the e-mail addresses of 20 or more of your existing friend so that they can spam them (I don't know if they sell the addresses they harvest in this way so that others can spam them too).

There was one called Word of Mouth, which I think has now disappeared. They invited people to give information about others anonymously, so that they could post malicious rubbish if they wanted to. Then potential employers could pay them to consult the gosspip -- and they could keep spamming to say that someone has written about you, come and see what they've said -- but of course you had to pay to do that. Entering malicious gossip was free, reading it was for subscribers only.

Some such sites are actually quite useful. One of the better ones is ZoomInfo, which just collects stuff from the web. They charge business users, but don't charge people for simple people searches. Not all the information they collect is accurate, but you can sign on and organise the information that is really about you for free.

Another of the better reuniting old friends sites is:

I've not actually found any old friends using their site, but I like their style.

Facebook works!

A couple of weeks ago I got exasperated when those silly jiggling advertisements saying "You are the 999 999 visitor. This is no joke" invaded Facebook as well.

Some months ago I blogged about it here: Notes from underground: You are the 999999th 999999th visitor, but that had little effect

I'd seen them on Technorati, on Photobucket, and on several other places in the web. But seeing them on Facebook was too much.

I started a Facebook group called You are the 999999th 999999th visitor -- this is not a joke!, which gathered 5 members. It pointed out that such ads were an insult to the intelligence of anyone who read them. The moment you saw any of them twice, you'd have to be very stupid indeed not to realise that it was untrue, and if it wasn't a joke it was a very stupid lie.

Guess what -- within two days, the ads had stopped.

Well, they'd stopped saying "You are the 999999th visitor" or "Your are the 10000th visitor". They used other more plausible numbers.

I still don't click on them, though, because I still find it annoying that they jiggle.

But I'm impressed by the power of public opinion -- all five of us. You know who you are. See, Barack Obama is right - Yes we can!

You are the 999999th 999999th visitor

Just about every time I go to the Technorati site nowadays I see an all-flashing, all-squiggling, all-jiggling message saying "You are the 999999th visitor" or "This is not a joke -- you are the 10000th visitor".

These ads also appear on several other web sites.

The most annoying thing about them is not just that they jiggle and squiggle, though that is bad enough, and makes me want to leave the page as quickly as possible.


It is not just the obvious untruth. Well, "This is not a joke" is actually true, because it is indeed very unfunny.

But it is the gratuitous insult to the intelligence of readers of the page.

Do Technorati or Photobucket (to name just two) really think that we are so stupid that we will not notice that if we were the 10000th visitor last time, then we must be the 10001st visitor next time, even if there were no other visitors to the site in between? How many 999999th visitors can they have? And how can one be the 10000th 999999th visitor? I'm sure I must be the 999999th 999999th visitor.

If they value visitors to their sites, why do they allow them to be insulted in this way every time they visit?

I realise that they need to have ads to make money, but do they really need to have ads that insult and annoy their visitors like this?