A while back I blogged about how Digsby had gone to the dark side, well with their most recent update they take another step in that direction. Today they introduced a new “feature” that allows: “Trending News: We’ve partnered with the folks at OneRiot to bring the latest trending news stories to your social feeds.”, in other words we put random spam in your feed.
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Yes, this can be disabled by going Preferences > General & Profile and unchecking “Show trending news articles in social network feeds”, but that’s not really the point. Digsby continues to introduce features to increase their bottom line by auto-opting in all of their users without notifying them of the changes. How did they not learn their lesson from Facebook’s Beacon fiasco or even their own policy of automatically opting in users for their own for-profit research? I ask of you again Digsby if you are going to change the way your product work you need to explain it to the user and let them opt in or out. You’ve done this when you added features like achievements but you fail to do so when it comes to your bottom line. I ask you again please come back from the dark side.
Without notifying? The blog post announcing this release listed this as one of the primary changes.
Yes, without notifying. I opened Digsby, it updated and then I had spam in my feed. I did not receive a notification telling me about this new feature, but I did when they started achievements. Why would they deploy this differently when they both deal with content within the application. Digsby should not automatically opt users in to programs that deliver advertising, spam or news. If I wanted to follow such a topic I would. I can only assume that Digsby gets some sort of benefit by allowing OneRiot to place unsolicited messages in users feeds. My problem is anytime a change can benefit Digsby’s bottom line users are always automatically enrolled, whereas if it is new feature such as Achievements I am asked my preference about if I wish to participate. This philosophy should be used for any type of new feature. This story wouldn’t exist if I had a simple box on first login that explained the new feature with an example of it in a feed with a simple yes or no if I would like to enable it. Instead I have to go find the Digsby blog because that is where it explains the new feature and how to disable it. The next problem is that today it is news tomorrow it will be advertising…