10minutes
12-19-2007, 11:56 PM
I’ve been a big fan of Social Networks. I’m semi active on Sphinn and a few others. I’ve written several different blog posts that months later are still referred to.
I typically don’t have a bad experience with Social Networks except for one big problem that occurred today.
How would you feel if you’ve spent four months building up your profile only to have your account taken away from you? Now, if you violate TOS or guidelines then sure I can understand why it was taken away but what if you didn’t do anything wrong to deserve losing your account?
Today this very incident happened to me. A Social Bookmark type site called ClaimID took away my account because of either a flaw in their system OR poor planning on their end during site creation.
This Social Network felt that my username was so good that they wanted to reserve it. Unfortunately this happened four months AFTER I created and built the profile page up. Their excuse was that their system didn’t recognize the username which was apparently ‘reserved’. To me this translates to, “We didn’t think about reserving this one; let’s take it from the user.”
This evening I’ve published a page on my blog, Sphunn it and bought Stumble Traffic. I am now posting in the forums I participate in to warn everyone that this particular Social Network will take away your profile for their gain.
Bad publicity may be good publicity but I hope they have a lot of reputation management to look forward to after my complaining.
If marketers or other people cannot trust a Social Network to have access to your account then why should be use them?
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
I typically don’t have a bad experience with Social Networks except for one big problem that occurred today.
How would you feel if you’ve spent four months building up your profile only to have your account taken away from you? Now, if you violate TOS or guidelines then sure I can understand why it was taken away but what if you didn’t do anything wrong to deserve losing your account?
Today this very incident happened to me. A Social Bookmark type site called ClaimID took away my account because of either a flaw in their system OR poor planning on their end during site creation.
This Social Network felt that my username was so good that they wanted to reserve it. Unfortunately this happened four months AFTER I created and built the profile page up. Their excuse was that their system didn’t recognize the username which was apparently ‘reserved’. To me this translates to, “We didn’t think about reserving this one; let’s take it from the user.”
This evening I’ve published a page on my blog, Sphunn it and bought Stumble Traffic. I am now posting in the forums I participate in to warn everyone that this particular Social Network will take away your profile for their gain.
Bad publicity may be good publicity but I hope they have a lot of reputation management to look forward to after my complaining.
If marketers or other people cannot trust a Social Network to have access to your account then why should be use them?
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing