Scott Yates of Denver New Technology Examiner has been one of the many writers covering the Google Wave hype of the past couple weeks. He's written some mindful stuff about it actually, and had some insightful stuff to say via comments at a WSJ story this week.
It was much to my surprise today when my Google alert for Cc:Betty popup a story from none other than Mr. Yates, citing my company as having bad netiquette. "WTF" I said aloud, and I didn't use the abbreviations. Calling someone's hard work a scam are pretty much fighting words as far as I'm concerned.
An excerpt from Mr. Yates article: "I've written before about Google Wave scams, and even Google Wave scams designed to look like they are helping combat other scams.
Now there's another flavor of scam which has the wrappings of something that could look legitimate: Companies offering help with Google Wave invites that is actually no help at all. I've seen a few, but to my mind the worst offender is CC: Betty, which is actually a legitimate company that has a modestly interesting product.
Whoever is running the @ccbetty Twitter page, unfortunately, is breaking the rules of netiquette.
They are finding all the people who tweet about the desire for a Google Wave invite, and urging them to click a link that just goes back to CC:Betty. It's like they are saying to someone who is hungry: "Hey! Here's something that can help: Go outside and with some chalk write down the things you'd like to eat."
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And then I commented with: I'm the alleged here. You wrote: "They are finding all the people who tweet about the desire for a Google Wave invite, and urging them to click a link that just goes back to CC:Betty". Respectfully, this is just not true.
We're not a Wave invite scam by any means. A Wave invite scam would mean we're saying "Come get your Wave invite here: ccbetty dotcom". That's NOT what we're doing.
Rather we're simply getting in the conversations. When someone says they're desperately waiting for their Wave invite, we're saying: "Hey, while you're waiting for your Wave invite you might like this service Cc:Betty (and we provide a link). It's not quite the same as Wave, but kinda similar".
Most times people @ back and say "thanks this is cool". And later, many of them tweet about it.
Is this really bad netiquette or just social media at play?
Michael Cerda, CEO @ Cc:Betty"
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It seems as though Mr. Yates had nothing else better to write about today. This seemed like an attempt to keep alive his ongoing coverage of Google Wave. Perhaps a better story would have been:
"Don't have your Google Wave invite Yet? Here are 5 companies you should check out while you're waiting."
Technorati Tags: Cc:Betty, Google Wave, Denver New Technology Examiner, Scott Yates, WTF
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