The Shady Business Practices of Classmates.com 275
eldavojohn writes ""Some of your classmates are trying to contact you!" reads one e-mail. Attempts to remove yourself from the mailing list may only result in more mailings from the site of ill repute. Well, Ars Techica brings us news of a suit against Classmates.com. You don't need to look far for anti-classmates.com sentiment spreading like wild fire across the tubes." Good next target: ads that say "you've already won" some expensive toy.
Already illegal (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure this is already illegal. I've never seen such an ad. Perhaps you are thinking "you may already have won," but I don't see why that should be illegal.
Re:Why use that? (Score:5, Interesting)
I signed up a long time ago, before myspace or facebook existed. It's a totally worthless site.
I've done my part to screw with their business model... they let you post a picture, and my "picture" is a gif of my email address. :)
Re:Already illegal (Score:4, Interesting)
Because it's misleading and the actual probability of having won is statistically insignificant? Why not have a banner ad that says "You might be able to play the piano with your feet!", cause then, by some fluke chance it might be true..? In the end, it's lying, plain and simple.
I signed up for classmates.com (Score:3, Interesting)
... but I've left instructions there to look for me elsewhere, since classmates.com wants money for anything useful.
If all the other social networking sites can do it for free, why use classmates.com?
Re:They are also giving out your credit card... (Score:3, Interesting)
If they're doing that sort of thing on a regular basis, disputing the charge is trivial. I had it happen once with a one-time membership fee at a web site that was not only turned in to a recurring membership, but double charged, to boot. I didn't even have to fill out the usual chargeback paperwork when I called my credit card company. It was the usual, skeptical, "Well, let me just pull this up and see what we have" attitude until I told him which charge, and he pulled up the chargeback history on that merchant, and told me "The credit will be on your account by tomorrow."
From the sounds of it, classmates.com is either in, or rapidly headed to, that category.
Re:Why use that? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about some positives? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly negative stuff about classmates here; and I don't disagree with the lawsuit, which is about tactics, not content. But let me tell you a couple of stories about how classmates contributed positively to a couple of situations.
I had a colleague who told me an intriguing and sorrowful story. She got pregnant during her very first sexual experience. Her mother was in denial until the baby started kicking. Her mother then proceeded to put her daughter in an apartment in a nearby city, cut her red hair and dye it black, and wait for the baby to come to term. It was born and whisked away for adoption before my colleague laid eyes on it. (What a mother, eh?) The father was never informed and told my colleague was spending the semester overseas. Mother arranged letters to be sent from France until they dwindled to nothing. I was told this story maybe 20 years ago, and the thing is, I knew the father slightly because I knew I had see a picture of him on the swim team in my annual, who had gone to my high school (along with Ted Bundy). About 5 years ago my colleague, through her own research, found her long-lost son. We decided to try to contact the father. I went through classmates.com and found him. My colleague paid for my gold membership for a year. I contacted the father via email, set up a meeting, and he and my colleague were re-united. He was, of course, very surprised to know he had a grown son. Father and son got into contact, and, for better or worse, both natural parents are in contact with their son. Naturally, they do not replace the 'real' family who raised the kid, but it certainly expanded all their lives. I didn't re-up with Classmates. I get an email once in awhile, but it's certainly nothing overwhelming or particularly bothersome.
The second thing classmates has allowed me to do is researh in genealogy. A few of us were into DNA analysis of the family (for our own reasons) going back to the late 1700's when our ancestor in question lived. His name was Jeremiah Pack and we wanted to know his ethnic background along with that of his wife. We found direct descendents of Jeremiah pretty readily, but finding direct descendents of his wife was a daunting task because surnames of females change every generation. After several years of research we finally found a 4th cousin or so who had a complete chart with names. I was able to go onto classmates.com and find the names, and write to the likely suspects. I found a couple of women who were direct descendents of Jeremaih's wife through the female lines, therefore their MtDNA was a match. We were able to do the testing and come to a suitable conclusion. This is not as 'heart-rending' a story as the first one, but I have to tell you it settled a generations-old mystery and legend for our families.
In both cases, the positive conclusions would not have been possible without classmates.com. That doesn't forgive their questionable marketing tactics, but let's not claim the service has no value. It depends on what you are looking for.
Re:Google FTW (Score:3, Interesting)
Luckily my ISP subcontracted their normal email out to Google, so while I don't have the Gmail domain name on those accounts, I get the Gmail interface with no ads displayed. Best of both worlds.
Facebook for dummies? (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of us who are 30+ associate those sites with the "OMG PONIES!" crowd.
I'm one of those. Ehm, the old guys, not the pony crowd. I took the opportunity to try to find out what Facebook is like because someone recently asked me if I had a page there, but it seems that you can't do anything unless you have an account and are logged in. The help section of the site doesn't seem to feature screenshots. Is there a way to get a feeling of what the site's about without creating a fake account? My old age keeps me from just entering all my personal data and worry later. Maybe there are some pages set to "public for everyone", so some URLs would be nice.
Re:Why use that? (Score:3, Interesting)
MySpace does the exact same thing but for free. In my opinion Classmates is a scam. I signed up, paid for 3 months, decided I didn't need it & canceled my account. 2 months after the original 3 months were over those fuckers were still billing my account. Even though I a.) didn't sign up for any kind of auto-renewal to start with & b.) canceled my pay account.
Fuck Classmates. I hope a lawyer jumps into their collective asses with both feet.
Ok, I will admit it... (Score:4, Interesting)
... I am the one who took the bait and signed up for the gold membership. Classmate.com emails were already going to my spam folder, but I look that over before I empty it, and their's claimed that I had "2 New Guestbook Entries!" or something like that. At that point I decided to see if anyone I knew had recently added themselves to the list, and sure enough, and old friend had not very long ago.
Suspecting that this person may have left me a guestbook entry, I bought the gold membership, instead of just tracking down his phone number. Upon logging in with my new gold status, I was rewarded by finding two guestbook entries from names I had never heard of and not from my school.
In my defense, I am usually smarter than this. However, the good news was that when I emailed support asking to have any and all of my information removed, they complied without complaint in a timely manner, and even refunded my payment. I was shocked.
The moral here is, if you get caught in a moment of weakness and stupidity like I did, send them an email demanding to have your info removed immediately, and maybe you will get a refund too.
Re:Why use that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Except for all these 'Ride a pony!' apps requests my friends keep sending me..
We can stop dancing around the obvious... Facebook/Myspace=GeoCities
Re:Social networking, web 2.0 - all crap. (Score:1, Interesting)
I wouldn't go to the extent of writing off Facebook and other social networkings sites as "crap" (with due respect to those who do). But yes, I do agree that social networking sites have the effect of making one lazy. In my personal experience, I would miss friends if I hadn't heard from them in a while and phone calls were made, coffee was consumed, gossip was exchanged (FYI: I am male and I'm not ashamed to admit I love gossiping!), hugs were exchanged (FYI: I am male and ....you get the picture). But with Facebook's ubiquitous status updates (and a lot of my friends DO use it), I now know when my friends have elation, depression, anal retention (don't ask!) or any other -ion possible. It kills my desire to call them because I'm TOO well informed and I hear from them pretty consistently. Yes, there are those few with whom I would meet regardless of what they have to say on Facebook, but for the most part, I've stopped making those phone calls and the personal meetings simply because I already know what they are up to and vice-versa. Incidently I DID meet someone recently for coffee dispite the facebook updates. The conversation seemed pretty redundant for the most part (yes facebook updates :()
I want my coffee. I want my hugs. I don't want daily updates - weekly gossip works just fine.
And yeah, like ted said, the personal touch is sooo worth it. Consequently, I have deleted my facebook/orkut accounts and my desire to make those phone calls has returned swiftly, not to mention, now that my personal information is not reaching the multitude of friends, I'm the proud recipient of many concerned phone calls. :-) Now if only I can get off slashdot long enough to return them missed calls...
Although I do think account deletion might be too drastic a step - I could have simply stopped updating my profile and left a window open for lost friends to keep in touch. Oh well, no regrets. I'm loving the offline attention so far ;)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Interesting)
I kept getting messages from Classmates.com telling me that former classmates of mine sent me messages. Of course, you can only view those messages if you pay Classmates.com. I knew this was a scam, but decided on a test. I altered my profile (first time I did that since setting it up years back) to include my e-mail address and a short message: "I don't read messages posted here. If you want to contact me, e-mail me at USERNAME at DOMAIN dot COM." (That e-mail address gets enough spam that I didn't mind exposing it like that.)
I keep getting "people" leaving me messages on Classmates.com and no real classmates have sent messages to my e-mail address. My theory is that these "messages" are:
1. Nonexistent with the e-mails serving only to goad people to pay for their "premium" service.
2. From Classmates.com itself or some third party company trying to get me to buy stuff from them.
3. From an actual classmate who is such a huge idiot that he/she doesn't know how to read in which case why would I want to pay money to contact them back?
Classmates.com is nothing but one huge scam.
Re:Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)
IIRC, classmates.com bought-out highschoolalumni.com. The former was a 100% free site and I encouraged a few of my highschool classmates to settle on "that one" as the place to go to try and stay in touch. (I used to run a majordomo of people I went to school with, but that got unweildy and fizzled out)
It was really damn frustrating to have all of this data entry we did end up being locked away in someone else's pay-ware database after the fact.
I have basically eschewed all social networking sites since that time. I'm not interested in investing anything into it, only to have someone else try and figure out how to monetize my effort. Usually by spamming me.
confession time... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a confession to make. Hi, my name is Ron and I'm a user of Classmates.com.
I got an account when they first started in the mid nineties, when the service was entirely free. When they went to a 2 tiered scheme, I paid for the extended service for awhile but let it lapse when I was laid off during boom.dot.bust. Went back to the free tier at that time.
I wonder if classmates.com started out legit and then more recently drifted to the dark side. I did not have billing problems when I quit the paid service in 2001, but that was seven years ago; don't know what they're like now.
They *do* send a lot of cruft in the mail. No doubt about that. I wrote a rule to trash most of it. But as far as the service itself goes, I have to admit, I really have been contacted by former classmates and renewed a few relationships. Not many, probably 12 - 15 in 13 years, most of them after the turn of the century. But if someone held a gun to my head, I'd have to admit that the service has worked as advertised. Forced to rate the experience, I'd give it an ambivalent-to-mildly-positive.
That said, if they really are doing all the stuff in the article, they deserve to have the crap sued out of them.
Re:Why use that? (Score:2, Interesting)
Go check out Facebook. You might be surprised.
Check what out? There is nothing to see unless you sign up. So you are basically saying: "Go join facebook to decide whether you want to join facebook."??
You are right, I am surprised. Surprised by the level of idiocy.
Why exactly should I have to join facebook to see the information facebook users have made 'public', anyway?
Virtually everyone I know with a computer uses Facebook
Of course they do. Because its like a contagious disease. If one friend starts putting crap on a website (remember geocities or angelfire or even myspace?) it was fine, because anyone he wanted could see it. They didn't ALL need to go get geocities accounts first?
But with facebook you DO. If you don't sign up, they can't see what the pictures or whatever that their friends/family actually want them to see. My father has a facebook account simply because my sister was too stupid to understand that everyone she wanted to see them would need a facebook account. And it was simpler for my father to join facebook, than to successfully explain to her why it was stupid. Once half your friends on the thing it becomes hard to communicate with them off of it... they keep droning on about how they've put such and such on facebook... the address to the party, the schedule for the soccer league, their baby pics... you get excluded... its like being the only person without an email address.
Except with email you can pick your provider. So you can find one with Terms of Service you actually agree to... or even run your own.
So far I don't have a facebook account, and I have no desire to get one. I don't remotely agree to their terms of service. I'm sure sooner or later some fucktard is going to put something up on facebook that I truly do need to see, and getting them to publish the information in an actually appropriate manner will be futile, and at that point facebook will get me too... but I've got my fingers crossed they'll die off and be replaced by the next social-idiots-fad before it happens.
eHarmony is much worse... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I fell for eHarmony. They are much worse. You know, us technical guys get so wrapped up in our work, we don't have time to meet any decent women.
Well, eHarmony will bug the heck out of you and "convince" you to sign up for a 7 day trail. During that 7 days you will get all kinds of "Matches" with interesting, and attractive women. Some will start communication with you.
You're thinking to yourself - this is great! I'm meeting more women then I've ever met in bars or anywhere else! Multiple matches keep showing up and your communicating with more of them. And you are thinking: "Wow - I'm going to be dating 3 or 4 woman!".
Then the 7 days passes. All the sudden, the matches slow down. A lot of the ones you were talking to suddenly stop communication with you. ( were they even real women in the first place? Or just employees of eHarmony.com masquerading as potential dates? ) Down to 3 or 4 matches a week. None very interesting. Not nearly as attractive as the matches in the first 7 days.
You email eHarmony and you call them ( finding the phone number takes a little work - they didn't have it on their website when I was trying to contact them ). A refund is not available after 7 days. You are out 165 dollars, if you paid for the 6 months.
They say you need to tweak your match "settings" to get more matches. Well, heck, I have every race and religion checked, plus I have from 23 to 38 in the age range, and I have 100 miles from my zip code checked. I live in a city with over 5 million people in the metro area as well.
After a few weeks, the matches are 1 or 2 a week. One a few ever respond. Most don't even communicate. After 3 months, the "trickle" of women is a steady 1 to 2 a week.
If you call eHarmony at this point, they either give you the "you have to be patient, it takes time to find the perfect match" line of BS. If you keep asking for a refund, they start getting annoyed with you.
Emails aren't responded to. I even wrote a snail mail certified letter to the CEO of eHarmony asking for a refund. Nothing. Not even a phone call or a letter. No response. It's like your emails and snail mails go to /dev/null.
Classmates.com? Just a minor annoyance. Someone needs to sue the heck out of eHarmony.com. They are the real scammers. I wish they would get sued big time. I would do it myself, but I didn't keep good records and this happened over a year ago.
Somebody please sue eHarmony??? Please!!!
Re: Facebook (Score:2, Interesting)
Within a week of making a profile there, I had 5 or 6 friend requests, all legitimate and from people I really lost touch with. I was impressed.
Exactly. I'm almost 30, and I felt the same way for the longest time. I just missed facebook in college, and had see the ghetto-geocities look of myspace.
But I went to my high school reunion a year ago and a guy I knew was like 'Get on myspace. I know it's lame, but just get on it so I can find you again.' I did, and it was lame for a while. I think I still have less than eight friends there, and two of them are family.
And then when I was trying to track someone down I got on facebook...and it turned out literally half the people I know were on there.
What's more, it started snowballing, with people friending people I hadn't seen since HS that I'd been looking for, but had no idea they were in touch with...or maybe they weren't, and just happened to search for them at the right time, who knows.
I fact, I've actually made a prediction about the future WRT this: The current generation of children will reverse decades of the trend in this 'mobile society', and actually keep in touch with friends their entire life. Which is an incredibly huge societal shift that almost no one has noticed.
Granted, this was supposed to happen with email, heck, it was probably supposed to happen with telephones or even postal service, but 'social networking' has changed the rules because it lets people actually find each other and get themselves put in each other 'address books', where writing a message literally takes five seconds, and people can actually stay current on their friend's life.
Even if facebook goes away, it doesn't matter. As people become used to such sites, they might move to a different one, but the point is they will sign up, and reconnect with everyone again, their entire life.
Re:Facebook for dummies? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for being unfindable, That can have its advantages, but I took the liberty of simply finding my friends by exchanging info offline and then befriending online. So together by our social graph and correct first names others can find us. But you have to know what who you're looking for. None of this random, "We sat together in first grade for a week" crap.
So yeah, I'm very anti-social in my social networking. I also use a client side css file to darken the harsh blueness of the site.
Re:Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a bad thing because it is harder to resist an advert for something you're interested in than for random stuff. "Targeted advertizing" is another way of saying "hit the weak spot for massive damage".
The most common portrayal of the Devil in folk tales is as a salesman, trying to get people to buy something. The difference between modern day salesmen is that in those stories, the Devil usually delivered on his end of the bargain. That's something for all the "marketers" to thing about.