Stumbling Around

I feel like I need to offer a public apology to every person with whom I have ever communicated through my g-mail account! The lesson learned: read before pushing "OK."

Let me explain.

I discovered a little thing called "StumbleUpon," which is a cool little task bar you add to Firefox

When you push the "stumble" button on the left, it brings up some random web page based on interests you have indicated when you set the thing up. Really cool. I've already discovered some great web sites (a wonderful etymology site, for example) and some marvelous photos.

Without StumbleUpon, how would I ever have known that there is such a thing as chocolate sushi?

So I've been playing around with StumbleUpon for the past few days. When you find a page you like, you click the thumbs up symbol next to the word "Stumble" and it adds it to you favorites; when it gives you a page you don't like, you click the thumbs down symbol and it won't give you pages like that again (or so the theory goes).

But I hadn't checked out any of the other buttons and once I got used to how the whole concept worked, I decided to see "what else this thing does." I decided to check out the "friends" option.

Sounded interesting--it can check my g-mail address book to see how many people in my g-mail address book already have the StumbleUpon toolbar. Blythly, I handed over my password for it to check my g-mail account (I have since changed my password). It brought up 12 people in my address book who also have StumbleUpon and it asked me if I wanted to add them to my list of "friends."

Well, of course I did, so I clicked "yes."

What I neglected to notice was that below where I clicked "yes" was a list of all of the names in my address book (everybody on every list that I have ever heard from or written to in the past five years--some 150 names, most of whom I don't even know. It also included every group list I'm on.) and asking if StumbleUpon should send an invitation to all of those people. I noticed it a split second after I hit the "send" button and it seemed to be stalling, so as my eyes noticed what was actually happening, I immediately hit the stop button.

But we all know about that, right? There is no "stop" button on the Internet. Within seconds, I was receiving dozens of requests--from me--to join me on StumbleUpon. I spent the next half hour sending follow-up messages to lots of e-mail lists apologizing for spamming them.

So to everybody who got spammed by me today, I apologize ... (but you might want to check out StumbleUpon anyway. LOL)

If there is any upside to this incident, for me, was discovering a friend I'd lost touch with, whom I hadn't heard from for a year, and learning that she now has a blog. So it wasn't a total loss ... for me, anyway!