A friendly VC suggested this meme -- will Spoke be the Napster of Social Networking? And that isn't Napster as in good -- viral, inventive, breakthrough, industry changing... that would be Napster as in bad -- accused of breaking laws, shut down, investors sued...
If you haven't investigated social networking yet you should take a look at the two services that are making waves -- LinkedIn and Spoke
Did you know that you are probably already in Spoke? Only 50,000 users and already 7 million people are linked to each other. They do this by taking their member's email mailboxes and indexing everyone that the member has ever sent or received mail from. Then they cross-index with anyone else already in their system and add a variety of other Internet sourced information about each person to build a profile of the member's contacts.
Imagine the ultimate result -- an automatically generated profile of you which includes your photo, your home address, phone numbers, email addresses, jobs you've worked at, your blog, other people's opinions of you... in short any piece of information out there about you. A people Google on steroids.
Feel that your privacy has been encroached on yet?
So with spoke gathering information and building dossiers on millions of people that have no connection to the service, isn't it just a matter of time before someone sues?
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