Businesses that reach a certain size often find that with great success comes great challenges.
Last August, Tagged became the target of a class action lawsuit related to our invite-your-friends feature. Despite differences of opinion about Tagged’s intentions, we agreed that Tagged had a responsibility to make sure people who interact with Tagged have a positive experience.
I’m pleased to say that we recently settled the class action and have agreed to address the plaintiffs’ concerns and offer a more streamlined account cancellation process for users. In addition, Tagged has agreed to pay $20,000 (plus attorney’s fees) to the plaintiffs to settle the case.
As you know, consumer safety and privacy has been a priority since we first built Tagged, and the agreement we recently reached underscores this commitment. We are happy to have put the dispute behind us and continue to focus our attention on the mission of Tagged: to help people discover new people and create connections online.
Our engineering team is busy rolling out new features for you to enjoy. Here are the latest features for our online social game, Pets.
Pets
We’ve improved our popular Pets game by including rankings. Now users can see how they stack up against others in their country, all of Tagged, or just amongst their friends. Pets is one of Tagged’s most popular online social games, where users (Pets), are bought and sold based on value and the profits are divided between the seller and the “Pets.” Compare how your Pets are ranking within the network you chose. Start playing now!
Tagged Tip!
Send a message to your past buyers, alerting them every time you have a new collection of Pets. It’s a great way to market yourself and show that your collection is constantly updating!
Engineers are the real movers and shakers in our world. With over 80 million registered users, the engineers at Tagged are constantly improving site functionality, creating new innovations, and making a huge impact on the site. Tagged is thriving due to the strength of our engineering team, many of whom are recognized in the industry.
The engineers at Tagged are connected by a common love of technology, challenge, and building a great product. They are assisted by top-notch in-house staff and provide responsive, high quality engineering services to Tagged. Some of our most talented engineers have come from companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Diego, who leads our growth and analytics team, came to Tagged from Microsoft’s CRM Enterprise API and Workflow team, where he was a developer working on the Enterprise API and Workflow team. Before his time at Tagged, John, who works in our infrastructure team, was the Co-Founder and CTO of Untangle, an open-source network security gateway that currently protects more than one million computers. So why did John and Diego decide to join Tagged?
“I wanted to join a start-up and I wanted to move to San Francisco” said Diego. “At Microsoft, I noticed I wanted to get more in touch with the pulse of a company, be a little more on the edge. Tagged was doing well and seemed to have great people to work with and challenging tasks. It was a good fit.” For John, the San Francisco waterfront office and free meals was an added bonus. “When I’m evaluating positions, I look at three things: the team, the product, and the company. The people at Tagged are some of the best I’ve ever worked with; all super smart yet able to play in the sandbox with the rest of us. After working on packaged business software most of my career, I wanted to move into a consumer web site and Tagged is one of the biggest and most interesting.”
What keeps John and Diego busy during work hours? John is currently working on Pets and the search engine. “As a software engineer I love to learn new technologies and there are plently here to keep me busy” said John. For Diego, he is working on creating the right mocking framework for Tagged’s PHP unit testing. He said “I would say building the data warehouse essentially from scratch on a brand new system and standardizing how logging / loading and reporting is done has been very rewarding. It automated a lot of parts of my job early on :D I really like the people I work with though as an ongoing experience, there are a lot of creative thinkers here that want to make a difference for our users and its great working with them.”
Want to join Diego and John in building something rewarding? Check out Tagged’s technology overview and the open positions. Tagged provides employees with comprehensive and competitive benefits that few startup companies can match.
Tagged protects its members’ privacy vigorously, allocating significant engineering, product development and legal resources to help safeguard its members’ online accounts. As part of this effort, we have repeatedly, and at substantial monetary expense, filed suit in federal court against persons and businesses that have victimized Tagged members with phishing attacks aimed at identity theft and spam attacks promoting pornographic websites, among other offenses.
Earlier this week, Tagged — and our members — won a small battle against spam and those who create it.
We are pleased to announce that, after filing nine lawsuits against those responsible for millions of unwanted and inappropriate spam messages directed at Tagged users, United States District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California awarded Tagged $201,975 in damages and costs against the California resident behind a bunch of the spam.
This judgment is the direct result of the tireless efforts of our engineering team, security experts and legal personnel and the countless other individuals devoted to finding, exposing and prosecuting the sources of these spam attacks. You can rest assured that your efforts are not in vain.
All Tagged members should know that we are constantly working hard to protect you against spam and maintain your safety and privacy, and your continued efforts to maintain Tagged as a safe and enjoyable site gives us the resolve to keep up the fight.
Tagged is thrilled to announce that we have raised the $25,000 we hoped to achieve with members buying Gold in support of the Yele Haiti Earthquake Foundation. Due to this outpouring of generosity from our community, Tagged has decided to double the funds and increase our donation to $50,000 to help the people of Haiti. With over 80,000 Tagged members living in Haiti, we are honored to offer this additional funding to support Yele’s earthquake relief efforts.
Tagged selected the Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund created by musician, producer and entrepreneur Wyclef Jean because of its grassroots approach. The organization has been working hard to build global awareness for Haiti while helping transform the country through programs in education, sports, environment and community development. Yele Haiti has also launched the Haiti Earthquake Alliance, combining organizations and first responders together to bring a coordinated effort in delivery of relief materials and services needed by the earthquake survivors in Haiti.
Tagged will continue its support for Haiti relief efforts by promoting MTV’s ‘Hope for Haiti’ telethon and encouraging its members to watch and donate. Wyclef Jean and actor George Clooney are hosting MTV’s ‘Hope for Haiti,’ a two-hour global telethon that will air Friday, January 22, 2010. All donations will directly benefit Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, UNICEF and Wyclef’s Yele Haiti Foundation. For more information, please see MTV’s official announcement about Hope for Haiti.
We continue to keep our members in Haiti, and the people of Haiti, in our thoughts during this devastating time.
Image credit- Yele Haiti
On January 12, an earthquake measuring 7.0 devastated the island of Haiti, generating an outpouring of support and donations for the Haitian people. Tagged and our users have a strong connection to the people in Haiti. We have over 80,000 members in Haiti and they are all in our thoughts and prayers. The need is immense and we want to do all we can to support relief efforts. From now until Tuesday 1/19/10, for every $1 our members spend buying Gold, Tagged will donate $1 to Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, up to $25,000. For this cause, we are also providing a 20% Bonus to members who buy or earn Gold anytime from now until Tuesday 1/19/10 11:59pm PST. Note: Gold must be credited to member accounts by Tuesday 11:59pm to receive the 20% bonus.
Our hearts go out to our members in Haiti, and the people in Haiti. We encourage our community of members to donate what they can and we hope that in our small way, every dollar raised will make a meaningful difference.
We received news in December from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that made everyone at Tagged feel proud of our continued efforts to ensure social networks are safe places to meet new friends. Tagged, as well as 13 other social networking sites, agreed to take action on registered sex offenders who have accounts on our sites identified using New York’s Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act. Under the e-STOP list, we were able to review and take action on approximately 950 potential offenders who have accounts on Tagged, most of whom are not active users. Attorney General Cuomo said “The country’s most popular social networking sites have taken an important step in making the Internet safer by using e-STOP to purge sex offenders from their sites”. Click here to read Attorney General Cuomo’s official press release. Here at Tagged, we are proud to support Attorney General Cuomo’s vital efforts.
This step is just another in a series of initiatives by Tagged that are designed to increase our users safety and privacy. In October, Tagged rolled out an improved registration and invite-your-friend process, which provided clearer instructions and more visible buttons and links during the registration steps. For more information on this, please revisit our blog post here. Tagged is committed to the security of the website and its users and will continue to implement new features and processes that maintain this as our site continues to grow.
Welcome to Tagged International!
We’re very excited to announce that Tagged is now available in seven languages in addition to English with more planned soon.
With 80+ million registered users worldwide, representing well over 150 countries, having Tagged translated into different languages has been a key priority for us this year. Recently, we made Tagged available in these languages:
- Español – América Latina
- Español – España
- Español – México
- Português
- Nederlands
- Français
- Deutsch
Besides the actual translation process, there’s a lot of planning and work that goes into a feature enhancement of this size and scope. Our engineers had to revamp a significant amount of code to prepare for the multitude of languages we will be rolling out in the coming months. And then everyone from product, to design, to customer service gets involved in order to make it all come together. A future enhancement will allow for Tagged users to participate in helping us translate the site too.
You can change your language using the drop down menu in the “footer” section at the bottom of every Tagged page or by going to your account settings page.
We’re planning to roll-out ten more languages early next year and will continue to add additional languages throughout 2010, including Arabic and Persian.
We’re pleased to see a significant up-tick in new members and traffic from countries that speak these languages just added to Tagged. This just goes to show that connecting with friends – new and old – is truly a popular activity around the world :)
Almost six months ago, as part of a membership-recruitment drive, millions of Tagged members invited their friends to join our community. A majority of those invited either joined or declined without complaint. However, a small but vocal minority expressed that we were too ambitious in our recruitment efforts. Accordingly, we voluntarily ceased the membership drive before being contacted by the press or any governmental authority. Nonetheless, the campaign attracted the attention of the news media as well as the attorneys’ general in New York and Texas. (If you want to read some of my previous blog posts on this issue, click here http://blog.tagged.com/?p=75)
For much of the summer, we participated in spirited discussions with the attorneys general, arguing passionately that our business practices are honorable, and that 3rd-ranked Tagged simply follows the same business model used by the top two social networking sites—which also rely on the popular “invite your friends” practice to attract more users.
Despite differences of opinion about Tagged’s intentions, we did acknowledge that the membership drive aggravated some customers. We also agreed that Tagged had a responsibility to make sure people who interact with Tagged have a positive experience. To that end, in a meeting with Cuomo’s office, we proposed substantial modifications to our processes. Since then, we have overhauled our registration and invite-your-friends processes (details here: http://blog.tagged.com/?p=155), and will soon be adding more new features to increase member privacy.
I’m pleased to say that this week we settled our disagreement with the Texas and New York Attorneys General. Both settlements incorporate many of the modifications we proposed in July. Consumer safety and privacy has been a priority since we first built Tagged. And the agreement we recently reached sets higher standards on both fronts.
We are thrilled to put the dispute behind us and focus 100% of our attention on the mission of Tagged: to help people discover new people and create connections online. We’re certain the recent upgrades we’ve made, coupled with the passion our community members display every day on the website, will help Tagged continue the incredible growth we’ve experienced since we launched the company five years ago.
Consumer safety and privacy has been a priority since we first built Tagged. Today we rolled out a new ‘invite-your-friends process’ that sets higher industry standards for the millions of people who rely on this feature to grow their social networks.
Here’s what we’ve done to improve Tagged’s registration and invite-your-friends processes:
- Added clear language on the import-your-friends page stating that a member is giving Tagged permission to access their email address book and store contacts in their Tagged account.
- Clearly labeled the button on the import friends page as ‘Import Friends’ giving notice that clicking the button will import contacts into a member’s Tagged account.
- Enlarged the ‘Skip’ option to make it of equal size to the ‘Import Friends’ and ‘Send Invites’ buttons on each page.
- Clearly labeled the button on the invite contacts page as ‘Send Invites’ giving notice that clicking the button will send email invitations to email contacts.
- Provided clear indication that a member’s friends will receive e-mail invitations using the member’s name, email address and profile photo.
- Presented a link that allows members to view a sample form of the email invitation, including use of the member’s name, email address and profile photo.
- Included a ‘Clear All’ link and check box at top and bottom of the member’s list of contacts on invite contacts page.
- Added an additional screen confirming member’s intention to send email invitations the member’s contacts.
- Committed to make sure all email invitation subject lines and content are clear and not misleading in any way.
- Provided that an invitation recipient who declines a member’s invitation will be directed to a web page indicating that the person will not be connected with the member who sent the invitation.
A full set of screen shots of these important site improvements is available here.
All of us here at Tagged are passionate about building a social network guided by the original promise of the Internet: To make the world a smaller and more connected place. It is our mission to make Tagged the place for meeting new people online and we are confident these changes bring us a step closer to achieving this mission.
