Green Tea Ice Cream

So this is a new kind of early adopter “me to!” frenzy except that this time, you feel left out if you haven’t had an invite to turn down. Quechup began hitting the news – in a bad way – some weeks ago but it took until yesterday for my own longed-for invite to arrive. “Uh-oh, Quechup – I’d better not click on that,” I thought smugly.

Just in time. I was starting to feel outmoded. More seriously, the Quechup pseudo-virus has spread a long way very quickly. Guess that makes us not so much Early Adopters 2.0 as Lemmings 2.0…

Chris Hambly has a contrarian view that the service small print makes it clear that they’ll email everyone, without further notice, in any address book you choose to give them access to. Personally, I think they’ve broken with what have become well-established conventions of interface design for this kind of application (good summary of good practice by Patrick Ruffini)  that mass emails won’t take place without the user’s say-so. So responsibility goes two ways – on our side as users for being too arrogant and impatient to read the details and with Quechup for abusing our trust in the essential good will of humanity – actually, the more I think about it, the more I agree with Chris.

In any case, it’s a timely wake-up call that trusting every shiny new start-up that pops up in Techcrunch with our precious personal data is not necessarily a good thing. Amazing this hasn’t happened more often really. And even more amazing that it hasn’t happened with a Facebook app.