First of all an apology, when signing up to a new book-centred social networking site (Shelfari) I accidentally caused an email invite to the site to go out to everyone in my email address book. For christ’s sake, I’m supposed to be an Internet professional no? Not a bloody spammer or an idiot, at least that’s not what my business card says. So by sincere and very embarrassed apologies to everyone who got that email.

So that’s the apology part. The user interface part is to the point: please think about the outcomes of the design decisions you make when building a web app (or anything else for that matter).

In this case bad judgment on my part and poor UI (User Interface) design on Shelfari’s part lead to the presumable irritation of the hundreds of people in my address book who got this email invitation in error and my burning (but hopefully short-lived) embarrassment at letting this happen. But you don’t make converts to your social networking web app thingie by causing intense embarrassment, unless your app is masochist.com perhaps.

There’s another whole post in here about how to effectively share information about who you are and who you know online. OpenID and FOAF are just a couple of projects looking at solving parts of this problem effectively. I just hope someone gets there soon, like yesterday would be ideal.