This morning I found an email from Dennis Howlett whom I finally got to meet at Les Blogs 2.0 last month, recommending something called goowy as a new email client. The invitation was to set up an account and then let him know what I think. I like Dennis and know he gets involved in interesting ventures, and the way the invite was worded I thought he was somehow involved in this project. Also, as it was an early morning email-check (having gone to be at 3am the night before), I wasn’t thinking about matters too much and proceeded with setting up the email to test it.

First of all, it’s built in Flash, which is pretty but a bit of an overkill to say the least. But perhaps mainstream users like a graphically designed interface, so be it. Not everybody has to be a fan of gmail style simplicity. I moved on.

Secondly, when you sign up, you get to import all your contacts from your main email client. I use gmail and the import was smooth and effortless. Too effortless in fact, as I was clicking through the steps, there was a line at the bottom of the (visible) screen with a box checked, which only flashed before my eyes, as I was clicking ‘continue’. It said ’send invitation to goowy to your contacts’ or words to that effect. With horror I watched as responses (mostly out of office replies) started piling in into my new shiny inbox. You may say that I should have been more careful about proceeding to the next stage in the set up but you’d be wrong. I was setting up a simple email client, which is something I do all the time, when testing various new applications coming out of the blogosphere.

This is the real killer and the message is – You. Do. NOT. Check. Anything. Intrusive. By. Default. For. The. User!!! I am now incredibly pissed off at goowy for effectively spamming all my contacts. I did send an unhappy email to comments@goowy.com and I know I’ll be watching the fallout from this with growing unease. David appeared on my IM asking about goowy already as he received invitations from two of his contacts. He commiserated while I was fuming, offering the opinion that they don’t deserve to stay in business… And in true blogosphere fashion, he already blogged about it. I second that and may you burn in spam hell, goowy.

And now, what do I do? Send a link to this post to all my contacts? Groan.

Update: Dennis has a warning of his own.

And Ben sums it up in biz terms for them:

Sure, this clever stunt may have (artificially) boosted your sign-ups, I’m sure the VC’s will love that. But it’s created a lot of immediate bad vibe about your product, and that’s before you realise the main service is just a crappy flash app. Considering the way you have gone about all this, what percentage of these signup do you think will ever come back? Very few I would suggest.

Thanks Goowy for showing the world how not to launch a website!

A good friend of mine (and a social computing guru), David Tebbutt, has a round-up of his own. Literally. It starts with him getting a job as a programmer with NCR in London on 3rd January 1966… and the last line says:

2004-     : Blogger (and user of all manner of social software)

Blogger and user, I love it… I first encountered David in December 2004 at Online Information conference [link only to this year's version]. Well, he saw me first as I was delivering my first ever presentation about blogging at a major conference. A couple of days later, I received a very nice email from him. We started a conversation (how predictable!) and have carried on ever since. In January 2005 David came to one of our blogging bootcamps for journalists and had his blog set up by beginning of February. I do like his introduction on the first post:

Thirty years ago, it occurred to me that as long as there were people around, they would need to be able to communicate with each other. And, the more effectively they did it, the more successful they would be. This is still the focus of my life.

This reminds me of somebody’s favourite line about things staying the same at a faster pace than ever before… Professionally, David acts as a sort of sanity-check for me. There is much hype being generated by some genuinely amazing trends and tools and it is hard to pick the ones that will continue to evolve and revolutionise many of the areas that are now under much pressure from them – media, publishing, marketing, PR, communications, information management etc. Being able to follow these developments with someone who has been doing this for the last 40 years is priceless. Thank you, David.

Since this is the season for getting emotional, let me say that I am proud and privileged to know David and to have the benefit of his knowledge and experience. And the good news is that there is more where those tremendous 40 years’ came from so watch this space.

The value of wealth isn’t necessarily the THINGS you can acquire, it is the things you can do with it — the experiences and memories that you can ‘acquire’.

Think of it this way: Its the not the TOYS, its the PLAYING.

- Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture blog