New Feature: Find Friends
These include people who may be using the site already, but you don't know their user name, and people you want to invite to the site. It can use contacts from your current email system, or manual entry.
Check out Find Friends, from your profile or here.
An excess of caution. Automatic email systems like this have come under much criticism, including my own. After the nastiness that has hit other companies' efforts, we've taken every precaution to avoid mess ups with our system.
The protections are quite extensive:
- Members can only be found if they want to. We added the checkbox for that a few weeks ago. All older members were set to "false," unless they already had their email publically shown on their profile.
- No emails or other data are stored by us.
- Emails are only sent once, and can't be resent by you either.*
- When your list of contacts comes back NONE are pre-checked. (The sites that helpfully pre-check 1,000 names are really flirting with disaster.)
- We have removed any option to check all contacts, so you can't even do it by mistake. But we kept the option to un-check all contacts. If you do that by mistake, okay.
- Instead of misleading you about what will happen in one direction, we slightly mislead you in the other. That is, the button marked "invite selected contacts" (above) does not actually go ahead and send the emails. Rather it shows you the invite list one last time and asks you to reconfirm the list.
*To know whether you've emailed someone already we do store a "hash" of the email, a mathematical derivative of it that can't be used to reconstruct the original.
Labels: email, invitations, new feature
posted by Tim at 4:01 AM
18 Comments:
Please read this...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001128.html
The idea of scraping our contacts lists is good, but asking us to give out our email login details is very very bad.
The problem isn't that you might do something nasty to my GMail account (I trust you, I know it says you don't save login details) it's that it makes this kind of thing OK to do.
If we make it "normal" to give out our passwords to random websites when they ask it makes it possible for all sorts of phishing and ID theft to happen.
Or we'll just end up with damn captcha tests on every login page.
I tried out your feature, but was told:
"Oops! No contacts were found, please check your login info."
I did check to be sure the information had been entered correctly.
I have to agree with james that this is a very bad practice, especially since the page that requires users to enter their mail password is not even using secure HTTP.
James. I agree with you—and Jeff—to some extent. The answer are better APIs and other methods, even simple ones. For starters, I'd love to give a site a one-time access password.
That said, in my personal life, I give away my login details to these services from time to time. I don't do it for everyone, but I do it for sites I trust--and I watch how it's doing it very carefuly to prevent mass spamming.
The problem here is that there are no perfect solutions, and that all of LibraryThing's peers and competitors--book and non-book--do the same thing. This has had us at a serious disadvantage to them. I can't tell you how many emails I get telling me to join this or that new book-based social networking service. Usually I get them because they are designed to get you to send it to all your contacts, because their senders blush to the roots when I write back that they should try LibraryThing, "I hear it's better."
Ultimately, it's up to you. I'd feel comfortable doing it. If you don't, don't do it. We make it very hard to do by mistake, anyway.
This kind of feature is exactly why I don't like Goodreads or Facebook.
Then don't use it! We've gone to extraordinary pains to make this as acceptable as possible. But not having it was hurting us, and having it is making *some* people very happy (eg., http://librarianbyday.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/librarything-adds-find-friends-feature/).
T
I'm with the people who won't give out my password to any third party site, no matter how trusted, especially when it's not even using an https connection to get it.
Still, this looks like the most conscientious way of doing so imaginable, for people less paranoid than I am -- nobody could possibly accuse you of spamming, and that's very much to your credit. Thank you.
You should note also that you don't need to give out your password either. You can upload a CSV of your contacts or enter them manually. And you can use it to either find people or to invite people.
Tim, two suggestions:
1) Show contacts who already have LibraryThing accounts separately from those who don't. I don't want to send invitations, but I might be interested in marking people I know as friends or interesting libraries. It was not much fun, though, to scroll through a list of hundreds of contacts just to find the 3 who were already LibraryThing members.
2) Be more specific about what kind of structure the .csv file should have. I tried at least 4 different combinations of exporting from Outlook 2007 and never did get one that worked. Every one gave me the "Oops! No contacts were found!" message.
There is no excuse, ever, to ask for a third-party password. Even if you immediately discard the password, you're giving legitimacy to a practice which encourages not only abusive social-networking sites like Shelfari and Quechup, but outright identity thieves.
I will never give LibraryThing, or anyone else I wouldn't trust with my life, my password to any other site. No one else should.
It doesn't matter how many safeguards you put around a bad feature. It's still a bad feature.
Okay, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Bebo, Goodreads, Shelfari, Anobii,Catster, Dogster—I bet frickin' Dwarf Date does this. Please, name me a major social networking site that doesn't provide this as a feature--a feature that some users really really want (see the link I posted, to a librarian so happy at it that she blogged about it).
This was interesting enough that I did a little digging. (Tim, you probably already know this. But for the general interest of the thread:)
LinkedIn is the only one of that laundry list of sites that I have an account with, so I poked around there. The Yahoo contact option looked different -- rather than asking for your email and password as it did for Google, it redirected you to sign in at your Yahoo account. It turns out both Google and Yahoo have contact APIs that allow applications to get at the contact data without the user actually giving their password to the third party:
http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-2-1-contact-api-has-landed.html
http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/
Hopefully more sites will start using these options in the future.
(Full disclosure: I work at Yahoo!, though not in any area even remotely touching on this issue.)
Jeff Atwood's article (linked in the first comment) does an excellent job of summarising why this is dangerous. It is dangerous, and anyone who provides login credentials should understand the risks involved.
He also describes progress toward a better technical solution to the problem, which is for you to be able to delegate limited authority to a third party allowing them access to specific data.
I don't agree, however, with his conclusion that it is unethical to allow users to do something which is dangerous. It is important for users to understand the risks, certainly, and perhaps we can do something to highlight that more clearly. However people do dangerous things all the time without understanding the risks or even, more importantly, caring about them.
What does your email client do with the username and password you provide? How does your desktop Twitter client get access to your account? Are you sniffing the network traffic from your blogging software?
You take a risk every time you use your login credentials, but it's a calculated risk. Perhaps you could be doing a better job of the calculation, and perhaps we have some part to play in educating you about it. But I don't think it's our job to prevent you from doing something that - like it or not - has become standard practice, because we think the risk to you outweighs the convenience.
I've no doubt we will implement safer technical solutions to this once they become standardised. Using https is an easy one, we'll fix that ASAP - although you should perhaps be asking whether or not the service you give your credentials to over a "secure" connection is then using another secure connection to pass them on to the originating service!
I haven't played with Library Thing for a few months and today I saw the new tags page for the first time and I LOVE it. I didn't know quite where to write this or who to say thank-you too but thank-you so so much!
Machiavelli was not born in 1527, he died that year.
Oh, I'm sorry, that was supposed to go to the "Home Page" announcement.
I'm having the same problem as slurp where it just doesn't work at all. I've tried both logging in through Gmail and importing via CVS. Neither works.
Didn't know where else to report this. Cannot get the friend finder to work whatsoever. It has worked in the past (though I more often than not got the "Oops! No contacts were found, please check your login info." message), but now no method works. And other social networks (Myspace, Facebook) seem to have no problem with my contact list. So I wanted to bring it to someone's attention.
Thanks!
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