Jas Dhillon, CEO of Zero Degrees, posted a comment yesterday in an old piece I wrote in April about his company's release of an Outlook Plug-in. That piece has been attracting a lot of hits because of the Multiply mess (see The Ten Commandments of Social Networking, and related bits).

I believe that Zero Degree's email invitation approach is not "spam" and is an appropriate approach for a social networking application to use. I used the term "social spam' in the piece because I had inadvertantly uploaded all my Outlook contacts and invited them to join Zero Degrees. But, as I pointed out in the original piece, this was exactly what the tool said it was going to do. I, however, wasn't really paying attention when I hit the "ok" button. My bad. So, if there was any spamming going on, it was me doing it, not Zero Degrees.

Note that Zero Degrees is an advertising sponsor of Get Real, but that makes no difference in this case. I would make these clarifications if that were otherwise, or if this issue had arisen with a non-sponsor.

I thought I would post Jas' comment here, to help clear the air on Zero Degrees email policies specifically, and as another step toward consistent and explicit email policies in the SNA market:

Jas Dhillon

I just reviewed these blog entries on ZeroDegrees and wanted to set the record straight - also see STOWE BOYD'S CORRECTION TO HIS ORIGINAL BLOG [entry].

ZeroDegrees never on its own initiative emails out invitations to any member’s contacts - EVER. Only the member who owns the contacts can invite them to join ZeroDegrees and connect with them. The only way that ZeroDegrees could have sent out the invitations is if you actually clicked on the “Email Invitations” button – this is the last step of the invitation process. We also provide all new members who have uploaded their contacts to ZeroDegrees multiple options to "OPT-OUT or CANCEL" uploading and inviting their contacts at every step of the contact upload/invite process. Even at the last step in the contact upload/invite process you have the option to cancel by clicking on the (“NOT NOW”) button.

Our messaging is very clear and unambiguous about what happens at each step of the process. Members can always "OPT-OUT" of the process at any time.