Don't get tricked into spamming your friends

There are a lot of cool new website that offer incredible services. Many of them use your registration process to spam out to your friends.

Mike Elgan's The Raw Feed give a nice description of a rising trend on the Internet. Some of these allegedly "cool" social-networking and Web 2.0 sites aren't any better than the plain old Web 1.0 scams. During the site's registration process, you'll be prompted to "let your friends know you've joined" and ask you to log into your email or chat service. The site will then send a mass e-mail out to all your contacts inviting them to join the site also, except the email reads like it is from you, with your email in the "From:" section. Read the small print at these sites! Make sure they specify that they won't do such things.