Some rants, some tech, some random thoughts…

I thought I should share with you why I just canceled my classmates.com membership. I’ve been using classmates.com since 2002–long before social networking, as it were, really took off. Between now and then, many other online services have launched that offer similar or better services. Most of these, like Plaxo and LinkedIn, facilitate networking without requiring paid membership to access key features, and they do it without the indiscriminate splattering of offensive advertising throughout their site.

Today, a page I visited in classmates.com launched a window that impersonated a system message, prompting me to install “security” software. I couldn’t close the window without being redirected to the advertiser’s own site, and they implemented this in a way that made navigating back to classmates.com nearly impossible. If you’re going to treat your members with this kind of disregard, I’m not interested. Thanks for helping me get in touch with some of my old friends over the years; now it’s time for me to leave.