We all know that most successful startups got started by "spamming". Not everyone is a Google. For eg. Facebook spammed the Harvard mailing list. Youtube spammed Craiglist for hot girls to post on their site. Tagged got big fast by "spamming" too. See http://www.istokpavlovic.com/blog/?p=5
I'm sure many of plaxo's competitors would love to be in their shoes when everyone start cursing them. At least it's better than being ignored.
Now, given a choice, for your startup, would you spam? If yes, how do you handle the backlash? Ignore it?
As for myself, I think it is best to "spam". If I spam, i can grow more than twice as fast at the expense of the fury of maybe 10% of those spammed. But when those angry people started cursing you, you start to doubt whether what you do is right. But if you don't spam, there is a likelihood that you don't get the critical mass fast enough to fend off a future challenger.
How does teenwag spam every single site with an ounch of visitor anyway? They seems to have spammed USENET, digg, reddit, this site. Do they automate it or hire cheap labor to do it manually?
I'm not referring to those blatant buy-a-mailing-list-and-spam kinda process. I'm talking about the more subtle invitation "spam" executed by the likes of plaxo, hi5 etc.
Given how users got banners-blind after some years of conditioning, how long would it take for them to become Adwords-blind, especially with 99.999999999999999999999% of websites forcing these ads on them via Adsense?
The first version of Trulia was bad. Jackass bad. It's like those crappy Google Maps mashup site built by a kid overnight. When Zillow came out, I thought they had won the real estate web sector. That's it. Then suddenly, out of nowhere came a revamped Trulia with a better site than the first version and most importantly, MORE HOUSE SALE LISTINGS than Zillow. What's a real estate site without real estate sale listings?