If you haven’t gotten an invitation to join NotchUp lately, you’re probably in the minority. One person on a list I’m part of has counted 17 invitations in the past 14 hours. I’ve gotten a few.
Curious, I decided to see how the sign-up process goes, to see if it’s spamming your address book (I was silently praying that my address book wasn’t going to get spammed, but hoped my friends would forgive me in the interest of research).
Well, there’s no outright spamming going on that I can see. You get through a few screens, and then you’re given the option to import your LinkedIn profile. I did that, and it offered to bring in my LinkedIn contacts. I did that too, and got the screen below (the incentive to invite contacts is a 10% referral fee).
As you can see, while your contacts are opted-in by default, it’s quite easy to deselect them, or press Cancel. I made sure to deselect the contacts, pressed Cancel and no one from my list was sent an invitation (however, I can see how someone could accidently invite friends).
As social networking grows, we’re all going to get a lot more invites, notifications and other Bacn. But when it comes to your friends, take extra care to think if they would actually like to get such an email or not.
At any rate, expect to see a lot more of these NotchUp spams over the next week.
Alex Eckelberry