Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

XuQa is up to no good!

Posted in Cornell University, Education, Memes, SEO, Spam by Elliott Back on October 7th, 2005.

I was just checking my email and was surprised to find this sitting in my spam folder:

Hello,
Somebody on XuQa.com has added you to their crush list.
Click on the link to learn more.
XuQa.com/joinit

Cheers,
The XuQa.com Team

If you do not want to get any further emails, follow this link:
XuQa.com/unsubscribe.php?go=7cb0726f

XuQa.com -
1 (413) 884-1046
feedback@XuQa.com
88 Linden St. Williamstown, MA 01267
www.XuQa.com

I thought “hmmm,” I’d better check this out! So I did, only to discover that to find out “who” has a “crush” on my I would have to enter all my friends’ email addresses that I “have a crush” on and hope for a match:

How do I find out who my Secret Admirer is? Well if we simply told you, he or she wouldn’t be secret anymore :) (hint: common friends between you & your secret admirer are listed. going to each of your common friends profiles is a good way to start investigating)

What this is is not a viable way for people to connect, but an exponential disruptive mouth-to-mouth promotional scheme. If you can get people to keep referring all of their friends, you’ll soon have enough members to compete with the Facebook! Which leads me to the following theory:

In order to get mega-membership, why not send out crushlist invitations to everyone at Cornell? After all, unless all of them enter every other cornell student’s email address, they’ll never know that no one at Cornell actually sent a crush to them.

In other words, I don’t really trust XuQa. To take this even further, I have the suspicion that they’re harvesting data from TheFaceBook.com and using it to pre-populate their databases, as evidenced by the long lists of blank names of Cornell Students who all signed up on “Wednesday, Sep 21:”

XuQa stealing facebook names

What alerted me to this possibility is that I recognize a friend of mine, Jean T. Since it’s 2 AM, I haven’t had a chance to ask her if she signed up with XuQa or not, but I’m shooting off an email now. Her profile is completely blank except that she’s a Cornell Student and Female. Also, the name “Jean T.” is exactly what she uses for her Facebook profile! How suspicious!

Update:

Jean confirms that she did indeed sign up for an account with XuQa. So, my theory has no hard evidence anymore, although I still retain my suspicions!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 11:23 pm and is tagged with cornell students, cornell student, secret admirer, linden st, hello somebody, xuqa, facebook, spam folder, mouth to mouth, email addresses, williamstown ma, invitations, cheers, suspicion, match, databases, profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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