Last week, I went on a total spree signing up for sites in beta. A lot of new social media sites and other sites I thought might be cool or useful. Then I went to openpeople.us and signed up. (I’m not linking to them, because I don’t want anyone who may read this to actually sign up. Do so at your own risk.) It seemed like just another social networking site. It had the typical “friend finder” application that lets you enter your Gmail account info to see if any of your contacts have accounts at the site. But instead of allowing me to opt in to invite my friends, the application just sent a message to every…single…contact I have inviting them to the site and signed the e-mail as if it came from me.

Today it sent another message to all of those who had the nerve to ignore the original request. I can only guess that it will probably do so at least one more time before the invite “expires”. I logged in today and could find no way to stop it or delete the invitations.

Sorry to all my friends who I’ve inadvertently spammed. That was not my intent. I’m going to be much more careful where I point my betas from now on. Lesson learned.