Last May I was given the great privilege to write a sidebar in Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s fabulous new book, Designing Social Interfaces. The topic I was asked to write about is “onboarding” — designing welcoming experiences for new users by easing them in. You might have seen a couple blog posts that I’ve previously written about how Plurk and Yahoo! Shine handled the onboarding process.

The authors have given me the permission to republish the sidebar here in full. I hope you enjoy it and find it valuable. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

When you’re done reading, do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Designing Social Interfaces. It’s a must-have for anyone involved in designing and developing social products and services.

Erin and Christian, thank you so much for allowing me to be a small part of your tremendous project. I’m certain the book will be a bestseller, and the patterns will likely spawn a whole line of useful products for practitioners. Best of luck to you both!

Onboarding

What is onboarding, and why is it important?

Most companies think that getting people to sign up is the ultimate challenge, but what about getting them oriented to your site and actually using it? That process of helping people get started is called onboarding, and it’s crucial that you give it the attention it deserves.

When left to their own devices in a new space without any sense of direction or purpose, many users can feel lost, overwhelmed, and confused about what they’re supposed to be doing there. The user might have arrived at your site from a link in an article, an organic search result, or on the recommendation of a friend. In essence, the user is taking a leap of faith that she will be able to achieve something on your site, and it’s your responsibility to shake her hand and show her the ropes when she gets there.

They say you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and on the Web it’s truer than ever. If you don’t capture the attention of new visitors from the moment they arrive and guide them on their initial journey through the site, they won’t learn that the benefit you provide outweighs the cost—their time and effort to participate—and as a result, won’t stick around very long. Worse, they’ll tell their friends not to bother visiting, either.

Onboarding is the process by which you can help users overcome the cold-start problem—a blank profile, an unfamiliar interface, a general feeling of “what the heck do I do next?” Many websites force users to start from square one and build up content (and value) over time. Social apps in particular are prone to this because so much of their usefulness is derived from person-to-person interaction and user-generated content.

The term onboarding comes from the field of human resources and the common practice of new hire orientation. In that context, the steps in the process are often referred to as accommodate, assimilate, and accelerate—all of which apply quite nicely to how new users ought to be treated in order to bring them into the fold.

Accommodating your users means giving them the tools they want and need to use your site to their benefit. Assimilating means helping the user to absorb the culture of the site and, in a sense, come to resemble the existing users. And accelerating generally applies to delivering on the value proposition better and faster.

Oftentimes, the true value of your product or service becomes apparent only after significant use—perhaps because the user needs a sizable social network to really reap the benefits, or because continued activity on the site ultimately leads to something, like better recommendations. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that your users will stick with you that long. You need to help them get there as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to make your case.

Designing the onboarding process for your site is most commonly limited to a first-time use scenario: from the moment just after a user has signed up until the end of his first session. There are certainly extended approaches you can take to consider the user’s needs during subsequent visits until he is exhibiting a desired behavior on the site, but exert caution, lest you be seen as too heavy-handed or pushy. Typically, once a user understands the lay of the land, he wants to be left alone to explore.

A prime example of great onboarding

One of the best and most often-cited examples of an onboarding process is on Tumblr.com. Tumblr proudly calls itself the easiest way to blog and goes to great lengths to prove its point. The sign-up process itself is dead simple—just a single form to provide an email address, password, and desired URL. Once the user confirms her credentials by logging in, she is presented with the main interface and blogging tool, but most of the page is dimly lit. Her attention is directed to the toolbar, and a large bubble tells her exactly what to do next: “Create your first post!“. In actuality, there are a dozen things she could do from here, but the guide is making a decision for her. By limiting the user’s focus, Tumblr ensures that she is significantly less overwhelmed by the options at this point, while simultaneously being trained on the primary purpose of the product—to create content.

As the user mouses over each of the post options, only the subtitle changes: “try writing about something you did today”; “try linking to a cool website you like.” The language is clear and concise, the value inherent to the directive, and the user begins to conceptualize the variety of things she can achieve with the product despite the very simple interaction that is required.

At any point in the process the user can “x-out”—close the large bubble and exit to the main interface—without further interruption, but the copy and visualizations are compelling enough to urge her forward.

Once the user posts something, the next step in the onboarding process is to customize the blog. Now everything on the screen is dim except for the location of the Customize link. Not only is the user being taught about the ability to customize, she’s also learning where to access the functionality later on when she needs it again. Now that the user knows how to post content and customize her blog, the last step in the onboarding process is to “Follow some cool people!”. One of the biggest differentiators for Tumblr is its highly active community, but until a new user is connected to several other bloggers, she might not truly comprehend its magnitude. Tumblr overcomes this by encouraging users to find their friends early on, in a variety of methods. A user can scan for contacts in an existing email address book, or follow people under Staff Picks, Music, or Art and Artists. By observing the usage patterns of these popular and highly active users, new users will most quickly understand how to use Tumblr to their advantage, nearly guaranteeing more frequent use of the site.

Other variations on onboarding

Onboarding can sidestep the sign-up process entirely. TripIt, a travel itinerary and planner site, allows users to simply forward the site a recent travel confirmation email and TripIt takes care of the rest. By sucking in all of this content automatically, TripIt removes any effort new users have to put into the first-time experience and can almost immediately present the site’s value. They do have a sign-up process (just an email and password), but it is not required to see their tools in action. This strikingly reduces the barrier to entry and is still rare enough to make a user sit up and take notice.

When it originally launched last year, Yahoo!’s Shine, a website for women, had an interesting take on first-time use. Though it is no longer live, Shine’s onboarding process wasn’t directed at recent registrants, but instead was directed at first-time visitors to the site to help orient them to its variety of features. On a user’s first visit, a “Welcome to Shine” layer appeared in the center of the page. It said, “Shine features the best writers and bloggers in women’s publishing. Plus, connect with likeminded women, share stories and more. Take a ten-second tour to see more.”

By clicking the single call to action, a Continue button, the user was moved all around the page, with the browser auto-scrolling accordingly. It was a three-step process that also used the familiar bubble pointing at the functionality on the page with a short description of its purpose. It highlighted access to Yahoo! Mail in the sidebar, a recent activity stream of user-submitted content, and a quick-access headline list at the very bottom of the page. In the last bubble was a Get Started link that ended the onboarding process and scrolled the user all the way back up to the top of the page.

Suffice it to say, there are a variety of ways to handle a new user orientation. The user’s mindset and the site’s business goals, brand identity, and value proposition must all be taken into account. After all, this is the first impression, and you know what they say about those.

—Whitney Hess, http://whitneyhess.com/blog/

• Yahoo!’s Shine
• Plurk You
• Twitter changes its email notifications
• Pleasure and Pain now on UX Magazine
• SeamlessWeb: Don’t get between me and my food

I’m furious. Absolutely astounded and ready to scream. Why? Because Twitter just announced a drastic change to their service that will forever affect how people interact with the stream. They have effectively removed all discoverability of new people to follow and connect with, thereby destroying the very element that made Twitter the powerful networking tool it has been for so many hundreds of thousands of people, myself included.

So what happened? Well today Twitter announced that due to some “confusions” they decided to completely the remove the @ reply settings and instead stick you with the very limiting default without any option to change it.

Previously Twitter settings looked like this:

By default for all users, the Replies setting was set to “Show me @ replies to the people I’m following,” meaning that any tweet prefaced with the username of someone you weren’t following would not appear in your stream. Some prefer this setting as a means to reduce the number of tweets in their stream, allowing them to only follow the conversations for which they follow both people involved. Makes sense that it’s an option, but it was never the one I had enabled.

Instead, when I first became a Twitter user almost a year and a half ago, I had selected the “Show all @ replies” setting, allowing me to discover new people whom the people I follow interact with. This is specifically how I’ve been able to grow my network to such an extent over a relatively short period of time. By learning who influences my influencers, I’ve been able to seek out more people who can have an influence on me — make new connections, learn things I might never have learned, discover crossover relationships I was never aware of.

The new design:

Now Twitter has decided to completely remove the @ replies setting and permanently filter out from the stream any @ replies to people you don’t follow. I think it’s asinine, and so do a lot of people I follow. Interestingly, you’ll also see that people are unaware of the change because they always had the default setting selected. Perhaps what Twitter really needed to do was to better educate users on the settings, NOT remove them entirely.

People’s reactions:

No, Twitter, this was NOT a “small” settings update. This was a major failure to understand a deep, longstanding value of your service. Start paying attention.

• Twitter changes its email notifications
• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• Twitter Redesigns Follower and Following Pages
• Twitter FINALLY turns replies into mentions
• My Twitter Karma

As you might already know, I’m involved with a great organization called Social Media for Social Change that takes advantage of the connections we make online in order to produce face-to-face fundraising events around the country.

The first Social Media for Social Change fundraising event in New York City will be held on the evening of Friday, April 3, at the Roger Smith Hotel to benefit City Harvest, an amazing organization with a rich history in NYC. City Harvest rescues food that would otherwise go to waste and in turn delivers it to hungry New Yorkers. At this time where many of us are struggling to make ends meet, it’s important to recognize those who are worse off than us and reach out a hand.

I would be an absolute pleasure to see many of you there. I have donated 3 usability evaluations that will be available for bid. Tickets to the event are $45 each, or $35 each for groups of 2 or more, and 100% of the proceeds from the ticket sales and the event go to benefit City Harvest. You can easily buy tickets online.

As a part of #tenbuckthursday, we are encouraging people who can’t make the event to give even a small amount of money to City Harvest directly. It costs them just 28 cents to rescue a pound of food, so even $1 helps. Please give what you can to the cause –- $1, $5, or even $10. You can do it online at Firstgiving.com<http://firstgiving.com/sm4scnyc> and your donation is tax deductible. Please share this message and tag any tweets, Tumblelogs or blog posts with #tenbuckthursday to help spread the message.

Thank you for your support and generosity. It is deeply appreciated.

• The Flawed Dining Experience at Hill Country
• Photo of the day: Dollars and Cents
• Old Guard Versus New Guard: An Interview by Tom Johnson
• Ultra Light User Experience
• SeamlessWeb: Don’t get between me and my food

Skittles is one of my favorite candies. I love opening up a fresh pack, finding one of each color and squishing them together to make a rainbow. It just makes me happy.

I’ve been eating Skittles my whole life and I’ve been on a computer my whole life, and yet never in a million years would it occur to me to go to the Skittles website.

Why? Because the Skittles website does not enhance the Skittles experience.

I don’t need a website to find Skittles in a store — they’re in every deli, magazine shop and bodega in NYC. I don’t need a website to tell me how to use Skittles — they’re pretty, they’re sweet, and they very obviously belong in my mouth. I don’t need a website to convince me that Skittles are good for me — they’re not, and I don’t particularly care.

The Skittles website is not for the Skittles “user”. It always has been, and always will be, a corporate obligation. A piece of marketing collateral. It has a very small user base: Skittles executives, marketing departments at competitive brands, and graphic design students looking for inspiration. Its objective is to demonstrate professionalism, modernity, and whimsy. It is simply not meant for the consumer.

Everyone was up in arms yesterday so I thought I should share my perspective on the situation. What happened? Skittles decided to pretty much scrap their website and do a social media experiment: just display the results of “skittles” in Twitter Search with a small branding and page navigation layer in the top left. On the one hand it’s ridiculous — it makes no logical sense for Skittles to so tightly tie their brand to any social networking site, *least* of all Twitter which has a considerably higher age demographic and white collar, professional user base. On the other hand it’s pure genius — the most connected and vocal group on the web can’t stop talking about Skittles! The site cost next to nothing to build and they are getting totally free but incredibly valuable word-of-mouth marketing out of it, plus they’ve positioned themselves as leaders in the space. Given their target audience, it’s a home run.

When I went to Skittles.com yesterday, my jaw dropped. The fact that they redirect to a page full of what people are saying about them — the good and the bad — shows a lot of chutzpah. It shows a willingness to take a big risk with an unprecedented action. I’m guessing it won’t be up for long (it pretty much killed Twitter’s servers yesterday) , but it’ll certainly be talked about for years to come, and will likely be considered the moment when Twitter tipped.

Media page (YouTube)

Products page

Still, ask a kid in a candy store about the new Skittles website, or his dad buying him the candy, and they’ll think you’re nuts.

• Flickr introduces video
• Skitch!
• The importance of delivery to New Yorkers
• Apple Customer Support Fiasco
• I bought a MacBook Air!

Social media has created a world in which everyone is interconnected. Forget six degrees of separation; we’re probably down to three. So have we completely lost the notion of a stranger?

Charlie O’Donnell, CEO of Path 101, recently wrote a post on his personal blog about the shift towards using social systems to connect with pre-existing friends and away from using them as a means to connect with strangers. He contrasts the rather closed networks on Facebook with the open chat rooms of AOL.

The topic struck a chord with me and I was compelled to write a rather lengthy comment. I wanted to re-post it here because I’m curious to hear the perspectives of some user experience folks that I know aren’t reading Charlie’s blog (they should).

Maybe I was one of those people you were talking to in AOL chat rooms late at night. I got my first Mac in the 5th grade (age 10) and had my own phone line. I would log on when I got home from school and would be up past 2 AM most nights chatting to perfect strangers.

Fifteen years later, the only strangers I talk to online are on Twitter. And they’re not perfect strangers either, they’re friends of friends that I just haven’t met yet.

My AOL profile said a lot about who I am — my age/sex/location, where I grew up, my favorite movies/books/TV shows, hobbies, activities. Sure, pretty similar information to a Facebook profile. But what it didn’t include was: my name, my photo, my phone number, where I went to school, or any other truly personally identifiable information. There was absolutely no way I could be found. It felt safe.

Talking to strangers online during the most impressionable years of my life no doubt contributed to the person I am today. Particularly as an only child with two working parents. But had my friends been computer nerds like me with AOL accounts and private telephone lines, chances are I would have been up late every night talking to them — not to some 40-year-old weirdo in Minnesota.

What was really happening was that I was craving connection. Attention. I had to get it from anywhere I could find, and there was a box on my computerdesk that I could sit in front of and play a never-ending game of what-will-happen-next. Better than a TV show or a book, I was a player. I could affect the outcome. And it felt powerful and electrifying.

Now that virtually everyone we know in the real world is online, the need to seek out strangers isn’t as great. Between email, our buddy lists, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, etc… we’re always communicating, always sharing, and that thirst for connection is consistently quenched.

But sometimes, every now and then, the hankering for a stranger is still there.

Is the answer simply that now that everyone we know is online there’s no need to connect with a stranger? How has our design of social systems encouraged this insular behavior? Was there research that led us to believe that there was greater value in “meeting” and communicating with people in our real-life circles in the online space? Does our regard of strangers as unsafe dissuade the more cautious among us from embracing social media and thus there was a significant need to design systems around pre-existing social networks in order to tip (as Malcolm Gladwell would put it)? Are strangers dangerous entities that we need to protect our users from? And what are the use cases in which connecting with a stranger is actually beneficial?

Let me take a step back and ask: What is a stranger exactly? According to Dictionary.com, a stranger is a person with whom one has had no personal acquaintance; a newcomer in a place or locality; an outsider. When someone I don’t know sends me a friend request on Facebook, I assume they are a stranger to me. But then I can look at our mutual friends and soon I find that they are not “out of place” or unknown at all — I just haven’t met them yet. In the new web world, you’re strange when you aren’t connected, can’t be Googled, don’t have a LinkedIn page, aren’t revealing information about yourself/your career/your interests all over the damn place. That’s when people start to get suspicious.

People who don’t really know each other and could likely never meet are communicating constantly on Twitter. But there’s a certain commonality there, whether it be common acquaintances or interests or professions. And also, people are projecting outward in a very public way that somehow diminishes the uncertainty and fear and mystery that surrounds a perfect stranger. There’s a certain level of accountability there — liability.

It strikes me that dating sites might be the very last place where strangers are actively seeking each other out. I lump Craigslist into the mix, with its Missed Connections and Rooms & Shares postings.

Still, the underlying intention is to someday meet IRL. Are there places on the web that strangers connect for connection sake, wanting to remain anonymous and have an open communication with someone they needn’t worry about accommodating in their real life — a sort of sanctuary? Has negative press and some God awful criminal situations (albeit outliers) permanently shifted our focus to supporting and strengthening existing relationships?

Ultimately, what is the cause of the stranger aversion and is there anything we can do as user experience designers to create safe environments to harness the power of sharing between the unacquainted, never-to-be-acquainted?

• The Meaning of Friend
• Facebook Chat
• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• Facebook helps users “clean up” their profiles
• Twitter Twitter Everywhere

There are hundreds, probably thousands, of powerful social networking platforms out there, with new ones launching every week. Send 140-character messages with Twitter. Save links with del.icio.us. Promote content with Digg. Share music with Last.fm. It’s endless.

Lifestreaming — recording your daily activities through text, links, photos, music and video — is quickly becoming the norm, and the output is outrageously addictive. We have all become voyeurs, aroused by watching people expose themselves 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Yet with the deluge of dispersed content it’s virtually impossible to keep up. We hasten from site to site in a desperate attempt to stay current. In 60 seconds, I learned that Pro Bose is moving to Hoboken, Victor Lombardi is checking out Google Experimental Labs, and Christian Crumlish is bored with the company in his head. And I want to know more!

Twitter has experienced a disproportionate amount of downtime in recent weeks, and a theme I keep noticing is a migration to FriendFeed. Just by searching for Friendfeed Twitter down in Summize, I was able to find these:

Not surprisingly, Robert Scoble is ranting about it, and ReadWriteWeb has a post titled, “Twitter is Down — Come Join Us in Our FriendFeed Room,” which summarizes what everyone else is expressing: if I can’t get my Twitter fix, at least I can find something else about you. We have reached a point where it’s simply impossible for us to let go of each other for more than 5 minutes at a time.

What’s so attractive about FriendFeed anyway? It’s a social feed aggregator, a fancy way of saying it combines all of your streams in one central location. I’ve been using it for a couple months and had the same questions that Alex Rainert did when he first joined. Sure, it’s a great concept, but I don’t love the implementation (very flat) and just didn’t get immediately hooked the way I did with Twitter.

I’ve been wanting to pit FriendFeed against two other very similar systems, Readr and Socialthing!. What are the major differences? Which one provides the most robust functionality? Which is easiest use?

This is how they describe themselves:

• FriendFeed: “Discover what your friends are sharing, discuss with people you know, share your stuff from other sites automatically.”
• Readr: “20 profiles in 1. Put your blog, photos and more together in one place.”
• Socialthing!: “Get your digital life together. See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use.”

Now typically I would do the evaluation myself. But I’m curious to know what you think. I’ve laid all the screens out for you below. Use the comments area to give your thoughts on the benefits of each service. I look forward to seeing what you make of these.

FriendFeed

Signup

Friends

Me

Friend Settings

Account Settings

Readr

Signup

Friend Updates

My Profile

Account Settings

Filters

Readr’s blog hasn’t been updated since November, so I have no idea what they’ve got in the works.

Socialthing!

Signup

Lifestream

Post

Vote

Settings

So now that you’ve seen them all, tell me what you think!

• Places you can find me
• Twitter updating Facebook status without permission
• links for 2008-02-24
• People you may know
• Facebook Privacy Settings Redesign on Fortune.com

In the spirit of unreciprocated online friendship, feel free to add me to your networks on the following sites. Chances are good that I’ll add you back.

•   Twitter
•   FriendFeed
•   Del.icio.us
•   Flickr
•   Digg
• StumbleUpon
•   Upcoming
• Readr
• BrightKite
• Dopplr

Should I be connected somewhere that I’m not? Let me know in the comments.

• Social Feed Aggregators
• People you may know
• The Meaning of Friend
• Facebook Chat
• Why the new Skittles website is ridiculous but I don’t actually care

Russ Unger’s latest post “We Are All Friends Here. Right?” got me thinking about the nature of friendship on and off the web. I have made a lot of new friends in the three months since I started this blog and began using Twitter. At first I told myself that I would be using both strictly for professional purposes, but the more time I’ve spent at conferences, chatting with folks on Y!Live or AIM, going out for dinners and drinks with people I’ve met through online social networks, the line between friend and colleague has started to blur.

As you’ll read in my comment on Russ’s post, I think there’s a natural compartmentalization of networks that happens online quite similar to what happens on the web.

“…when you’re connected to someone on Facebook, that’s essentially like telling them that you’re friends enough to go grab a drink at the bar. When you’re only connected on LinkedIn, you’re communicating that you are strictly colleagues and nothing more.”

In my mind, the people I add as friends on Facebook are people I don’t mind knowing some pretty personal stuff about me. And not the “personal” stuff I Twitter about. I might tell you what I did for lunch today on Twitter, but I certainly won’t be telling you what I did on my date last weekend.

On LinkedIn, the only personal information that I’ll reveal about myself is where I’ve worked and what I did there. And honestly, I probably only want to connect with you on there for one reason: I think we’ll have something to offer each other professionally in the future.

But listen up: if we haven’t met in real life and had any semblance of an actual conversation, I don’t want to connect on Facebook or LinkedIn. These systems require reciprocation (you add me, I confirm), and by having you in my network I am tacitly implying that I vouch for you. When someone else in my network comes into contact with you, our connection is an instant jolt of credibility. Or hell, if they don’t like me it just might work against you!

My point is just that I prefer to use those networks to display who I verifiably know in the physical world. For those of you I don’t know, I really hope to meet you soon. Then by all means, add me as your “friend.”

There are a whole slew of social networks that do not require reciprocation and on those I’m connected to people who simply interest me. I mean, I follow Steve Jobs on Twitter (he hasn’t updated in months!). He certainly couldn’t give a damn who I am — and though I surely give a damn or two about him, I still wouldn’t randomly share my contact info with him until I met him in person. Hi Steve, I’m right here anytime you wanna have lunch!

Some people I only know through virtual channels, and those people are important to my life, but is it fair to call them friends? Take Matthew Oliphant for instance. He and I met over Twitter because David Armano told him to follow me. After three months of frequent tweets, IMs and post-dinner Y!Live video conferences with other Twitter folks, I definitely feel close to the guy. We tease each other, talk about work, share photos, gossip, whatever. But if I had an argument with my folks, I probably wouldn’t think to talk to him about it. I suspect that if and when we meet in person it will feel totally natural (especially in part to the video chat), but maybe it’ll be really awkward and we’ll decide we don’t like each other all that much. At that point are we no longer friends, or were we not really friends to begin with? And if not, what should we call each other now?

Figuring out who I am in the virtual world has been a challenge. It’s gotten me in trouble in the past when certain people who I’ve spent some amount of time chatting with automatically assume that we’re intimately connected and then wig out when I indicate otherwise (directly or indirectly). And at times I’ve been on the other side of the equation — confused when someone who I thought I was connecting with suddenly pulls away.

Maybe the reality is that a “virtual friend” ceases to exist when you walk away from the computer, while real friends remain with you wherever you may be. But in the age of mobile devices, we’re communicating when I’m at work, at home, at the park, at the gym, at dinner, when I’m shopping, when I’m just waking up…you’re with me in all of these private moments, so maybe that’s why the line gets blurred.

How many of you have formed what feels like friendship solely online? And how do you refer to it? Does it feel like something different than the woman who sits next to you at the office or the next-door neighbor you sometimes take walks with? Could an online friend maybe know you better than a real world friend because there’s a more consistent stream of communication? Can an online friend really know you at all?

• The Stranger Aversion
• People you may know
• Places you can find me
• Twubble
• links for 2008-02-26

My story, sad but true.

While doing research for the blog post I wrote on Sunday comparing the “People you may know” feature of various social networking sites, I made the soon-to-be regrettable decision to add friends to my Bebo account. Like many services of their kind, they allow you to import your address book in order to connect with friends who are already members.

Though I use my own privately-hosted email account and maintain my address book in Entourage on my home computer, I use Gmail as a conduit to import contacts specifically in these situations. I must have uploaded my address book to Gmail three or four months ago, and really haven’t looked at it since. So just like with FriendFeed, Goodreads and Pownce, I imported my contacts and found that six friends are already registered with Bebo and I could instantly add them to my network. So that’s what I did. That’s all I did. I said “Add friend” for each of those six people and then I navigated away from the page. I mistakenly assumed that the remainder of my contacts would be discarded, as they had been on all of the previous sites with which I had followed the exact same process.

I got up to get something from the kitchen and came back to my computer a few minutes later. Sitting in my inbox were six emails, Mailer-Daemon failure notices and other auto-responses. I was confused. I had also apparently sent myself an email so I opened it up. The subject line read: “New invitation from Whitney Hess.” Within the body of the message was a request to connect as friends on Bebo, noting my email address (twice) and a link to accept or reject the invitation.

My stomach sank. What had happened? Did an invitation somehow get sent out to my entire address book? I scrambled to log in to Gmail and scroll through my contact list. I was terrified to find who was in there. I hadn’t touched it in months after all, and I rarely if ever delete email addresses from my past.

What I found in that list was not pretty. Ex-boyfriends and ex-flings with whom I am no longer on speaking terms, friends of ex-boyfriends who I’ve been deliberately avoiding, and former friends who have deliberately been avoiding me. In other words, people who haven’t seen my name pop up on their screen in a really, really long time. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

I immediately deleted about 50 names from the list, also including random addresses for tech support, mailing lists, and various industry bigwigs whose email addresses I just happen to have, like Jakob Nielsen for instance. Then I signed on to Bebo and deleted my account so that anyone who follows the link in the invitation will get a “no such user” error and assume the email is just spam. That’s what I hoped would happen.

This morning as I was scrolling through my unread emails on my BlackBerry, I came upon the name of one of those ex-things. Nice guy, but not for me. Unfortunately it didn’t end amicably, and we haven’t so much as IMed since June of last year. I’m guessing he’s moved on and is happy in his life and I’m just a distant memory. Then the poor guy comes into work on a Monday morning and finds a message from me in his inbox. I can only imagine what he was thinking as he noticed the sender’s name, cursed me under his breath and then debated whether or not to open it.

His response, short and to the point:

“I’m going to guess that was an accidental request.”

I deeply appreciated his mercy. But it’s only been a couple days so I’m still bracing myself for what’s to come from the others. Even though I am 100% convinced that I absolutely did not hit any link, button or other control on that page to send this invitation out, something in the back of my mind questions whether I knew it might happen. Wasn’t it Freud who said, “There are no mistakes”?

Still, I was leading a perfectly happy existence with those people far in my past. I wanted it to stay that way, if not forever then at least until I’m married with children and outrageously rich so that these guys really have something to be jealous of. I want to sue the crap out of Bebo for doing something I didn’t authorize, but I’m sure they’ll just claim that I accidentally clicked the wrong thing on the page. Of course I blame AOL. Since the acquisition, I’m sure they’ve implemented all sorts of underhanded ways to accumulate more email addresses to sell to merchants. The bastards.

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Do I have any recourse? Should I just suck it up and get over it? I mean, I’ve taken the necessary steps to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again — at least next time I’ll just be spamming my friends; they’re used to ignoring me.

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