I’m late on writing about this, but I was worried that I’d actually help this company out. Why? Because whenever I write negatively about a company that gets tons of you to check out the company and some of you even like the services I’m ragging on. For instance, I said I hated MSN Spaces and almost 100 million people signed up for it after I said that including my own wife who says she wishes she picked another service, but is happy that leaving a comment there is so tough that she has very few trolls. 🙂

But this has gotten so bad that I think I need to write about it and explain just how bad this company is. Please read this post all the way through if you are one of those who think I’m an idiot and therefore anything I hate must be something you should try. If you do that with this company you’ll spam all your friends and you’ll be extremely pissed.

Which gets me to what got me to write this note in the first place.

Over the past week or so I’ve gotten DOZENS of spam from this service. Almost always it’s followed by an email saying “I’m sorry” from the person who tried it out.

This service sucks. Do NOT try it out.

Want more details? Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has been tracking this story.

Some more thoughts:

1) Quechup has just raised the bar for me to try new services out. Now I won’t try things out until dozens of my friends tell me that a service is safe to try. That means that competing with Facebook (or MySpace or LinkedIn or Plaxo) is going to be very tough. Services won’t go viral anymore because we just won’t believe the email we’re getting from our friends.

2) This has been going on a long time and has gotten to the front page of Digg, but I continue getting these things (I’m getting a few of these emails every day from people who should know better).

3) This is really pissing off a lot of people. I’ve seen tons of posts like this one over on Matt Dickman’s TechnoMarketer blog.

4) It’s sad that some companies feel they are going to be able to make a business on top of strategies like this one.

I’d love to support a lawsuit against the company for doing this.