Why did goodreads trick me into spamming my entire address book??

Hi All,

I wanted to post an official response from the Goodreads team to this post. First off, as Jessica, mentioned - we are very sorry Micki! Address book importers are a necessary part of any social network, and we have tried very hard to adhere to industry best practices. We have a goal that nobody should ever invite members they did not intend to, so I was very concerned to read Micki's blog post.

We have been continually improving out address book inviter every since launch. In early 2008 we moved to a 2-page invite flow and added a javascript confirmation before sending invites. This double-confirm has served us well, and I invite anyone to check out our current flow (screenshot here), and give us feedback. For reference, here is Facebook's import flow.

However, given this thread we can clearly do better. I consulted a user-interface expert, who suggested that our javascript confirm might be improved, because "who reads those annoying things anyways?" (another anti-pattern?). We agreed, and just launched a much more clear confirm, using a div. We also tweaked some copy to make it more clear for members whose address book did not contain anyone already on Goodreads.

The last point, brought up by Snowflake Seven, is that trusting a social network with your email password is a bad pattern. This is certainly true, and there are examples of social networks abusing this trust.. But like any media company trying to create a brand, companies like Goodreads, MySpace, Facebook, etc would never do anything illicit, because our reputation is at stake, and to be successful we need the trust of our members.

This being said, OAuth (a way to accomplish importing your address book without giving your password to another site) is certainly the way of the future. However it is brand-new. Facebook silently launched OAuth support within the last few weeks, unless I am mistaken. Gmail's OAuth support is less than 2 months old, and Goodreads was one of the first sites to implement it (we know this from chatting with their developers). So I am happy to announce that Goodreads now does support OAuth, and are in the process of soft-launching it and testing it. You can find our Oauth support on this page, or linked to on the bottom of our invite page ("friends" => "invite friends").

Goodreads was built on a belief of listening to our members and reacting quickly, constantly improving things and adding wanted features. We'd love any further feedback people have on how we can continue to make a great service!