I think it’s really cool that you consider me one of the cool kids that you want as part of your online social circle, really I do. However, please know just what it is that you’re inviting me to before you send the invite.

I’m talking in particular about Tagged. If you have joined it or thought about joining it, please take a good look at it first…

Let’s see, first there are the pushy invites the system generates –

You’ve got to love the little guilt trip that they try to send you on “Please respond or soandso may think you said no”

But do you know just what Tagged actually is? Before you provided Tagged with my address did you take 30 seconds to read what they do?

From the “About” page on the site: “Tagged.com is a premier social networking destination and an ideal place for advertisers to reach their target audience.” In other words, in the guise of “social networking” we find pawns to sign up for our “service” who then go and provide us with the e-mail addresses of their friends so that we can spam them and send them all kinds of garbage.

Heck, Tagged even spells it out further: “Tagged is experiencing dramatic growth Advertisers love Tagged because they get clear, uncomplicated access to our audience”

Now, I know I’m not very Web 2.0ish, I don’t have a MySpace, Facebook, or even a Flickr account. That being said, I thought that the purpose of all of the social networking sites was to help people connect with each other NOT to give advertisers an even easier conduit for spamming people.