Quechup - bad taste social networking?

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the like all harvest your webmail account to send invites without you having to send them individually. It's handy as they ask first.

I checked my email this morning and there were a couple of invites from people I trust to try out Quechup, a new social networking tool.

I was a little suspicious about it's self-important phrasing ("It's no wonder Quechup is fast becoming the social networking site to be on." Yeah right. Says who?). But before I could respond I spotted Boing Boing's stinging post on how Quechup is rotten. Apparently it spams your contacts with invites without even asking. One blogger even got his Gmail account suspended as they thought he was a spammer.

Ouch. Invasion of privacy AND spamming, all in one nicely automated behind-the-scenes operation.

Glad I didn't sign up.

UPDATE: The list of people going after Quechup is making its future look shaky: Mashable, Smart Mobs and Geek News Central are on it (to name three blogs I follow from the 492 posts thrown back from a Google blog search) and Digg is alight with conversation (all negative). Ooops.