Pageflakes, apparently yet another Web 2.0 online-OS startup, has resorted to spamming people in an attempt to get their RSS subs button up on blogs. I received this email from Pageflakes on 5 June:
From: Tegan Harris (Pageflakes) tegan@pageflakes.com
Reply to: tegan@pageflakes.com
Date: 5/06/2006 8:58pm
To: nichenet@gmail.comHi Seth,
My name is Tegan and I am part of the Pageflakes team. I have visited your Blog and noticed that you offer a RSS subscription service to your users. May I suggest that you add the Pageflakes RSS subscription feature, too?
You can then use this button http://www.pageflakes.com/subscribe2.gif in combination with the link below:
http://www.pageflakes.com/subscribe.aspx?url= (followed by your Feed URL)
If you have any questions or suggestions please do not hesitate to contact me.
With kind regards
Tegan Harris
www.pageflakes.com – The Web at your Fingertips
Latest News: Check out our sharing feature http://tinyurl.com/zgla5
Disappointing really, that a Web 2.0 startup would resort to spamming, particularly when they can’t even use their you beaut Ajax driven tech to actually get my name right in their spam email!
Tags: pageflakes
She got your name wrong – forgive her that fault. Calling it spam seems harsh though. Asking a blogger if he’s interested in offering his/her users to add a feature to their site that lets those users add the blog’s RSS fee dto Pageflakes doesn’t really seem that offensive and certainly offers value for you and the user. If you don’t want to add the button that’s fine of course. If asking and suggesting is not allwed anymore, well then we should all just stop communicating.
Best regards
Ole (yes, I do work for Pageflakes, big deal).
The fact that she got my name wrong is the clearest indication of all that this is spam: it’s obviously been sent automatically, there was no serious attempt at personalisation, and when you send out automatic bulk emails that are unsolicited, it becomes spam, plain and simple. I get several emails every day (although not as much as I use to when I wrote The Blog Herald) with people pitching stuff to me, so I’ve got no problem as such with emails from companies or individuals, but I do have a problem when they are clearly bulk sent with no real attempt to personalise them, a single email from a company is a pitch, a bulk send is spam.
Doesn’t the fact that there was a typo in your name show the exact opposite? Humans make mistakes, computers generally not (at least mistakes of this type).
Seth … ROFL!
It’s a shame that Marketeers of Pageflakes find no otherway to popularize their service. If I were them, I would start some cool new feature which would instantly hook bloggers to link to them!
But PF is a good service nevertheless