The co-founders of Flixster happen to be my friends and I couldn’t help but notice the post on Slashdot today about them. Flixster is a social networking site focused around movie reviews. The Slashdot post questions the ethics behind a feature Flixster has for getting friends on board. Basically, within Flixster you can input your email username/password and have Flixster gather the contacts for invitations to be sent.
I don’t get it. I do believe that other, larger, social networking sites like Facebook and Plaxo do the same thing. Why did Flixster get isolated as the bad guy? If you ask me, this post is lame. The interesting thing is does Flixster 1) benefit from the exposure, 2) become the poster child for this sort of email harvesting, 3) become the butt of vigilante Slashdot hackers, or 4) Flixster who?.