Many of you already know Flagr.
Flagr is a great mashup on Google maps, many say it is the best application ever built over the popular google service. I tend to agree.
Flagr has a typical web2.0 website. It is simple, uses somebody else’s data and services and gets the users to build up the rest. It gives a way for users build up their own communities, and it even thinks on the bloggers and let them paste the code to include their maps on their own weblogs. Everything is fine, but one thing.
I am currently a registered user at Flagr although I still didn’t build my own map and rarely use the service. They don’t fill my inbox with junk. Before last week, i only received two emails from them, during my registration on March 6th, until last week.
On thursday, July 20th, I received an email form the Flagr team announcing some great new features, bugs solved, and go on. Everything was ok if the email was not sent to hundreds of Flagr Beta users with the email addresses exposed to each other. That’s right. They didn’t send an individual email to each one of their users nor they sent the email with the addresses on the cc field.
And what did Flagr do about this? They apologized. You can read the mail I received here.
But what I was thinking about is how the credibility of Flagr will go out of this? They have behaved in a totally amateur way and I will no trust them anymore. It's true that there is not much I can do now, because they already have my data and they already have exposed my data, but the image I got from them is not the image of the best application over Google maps anymore.
For this I am warning you: Be carefull with your users data. This is a very delicate issue.
If giving away an email
If giving away an email address scares you/somebody you should always use an anonymous email, a throw away email like Yahoo offers it or a special email address you create for that purpose on your own mail server.
That's the ABC of the Internet combined with Murphys law.
Yes Markus, that is true on
Yes Markus, that is true on the side of the user, but I was talking about the side of the company.
Junk email or not, that is one of my personal email addresses, and Flagr exposed it to hundreds of other users. That's the point.
And you as a publisher, if you have registered users and you keep those user's data, take a very good care of that and NEVER do something like this.
I know what you are saying
I know what you are saying but that is Murphys law. Flagr is not offering a free and secure mail service, aren't they?
Somebody somewhere used the CC instead of the BCC field. That happens. If you are web savvy enough or happen to have enough money it might be a good choice to look for a mail server where all mailing list addresses are automatically by default put into the BCC field. If your mail server doesn't support that feature, well ...
Googles maps core competence should be maps? Well, some glitches might happen when combining data. Microsoft Office or the good old IE, not even worth to talk about. Bad.
It's a human world ... Forgive and you will be forgiven :-)
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