A few weeks ago, I wrote about the tremendous success of our Tags feature that was made possible only by our passionate community of content contributors designing and submitting over 200,000 Tags to our library. We just recently crossed over 250,000 Tags available in our library!

Today I’m excited to announce two new ways for members to contribute content – Gifts and Skins. Both of these were just launched in the last weeks but I have already seen a glimpse of the creativity that is sure to come.

Our Gifts feature lets members select and purchase Gifts for each other using our Gold currency. The Gifts store started with 20 Gifts designed in-house but has now grown to over 2,000 Gifts designed by our members!

Our Skins feature lets members change the skins of their profiles or create new skins from scratch. The skins library started with 20 skins designed in-house and in only a week has grown to over 200 beautiful skins designed by our members.

I love seeing the creativity that is expressed by our members everyday and we will continue to build features that let you share that creativity with your fellow members. You’ve all done a great job designing Tags and now I want to open the floodgates for you to submit your Gifts and Skins as well!

Here are some of our favorite Gifts:

There has been a lot of press regarding New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s announcement yesterday that he intends to bring a lawsuit against Tagged.

We are dismayed that Cuomo’s office, which has shown itself to be fairly well-versed in the Internet, would issue an inaccurate and inflammatory accusation. We can only believe that they have not carefully reviewed the facts.

So here are the facts. Let them speak for themselves.

Tagged has not “raided” email address books, “stolen identities” or “spammed” millions of people. The descriptive analogy to “breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail” to a person’s contacts is evocative, but it is not accurate.

The ”invite your friends” practice that the A/G’s office objects to has been standard practice among all top social networks for over five years. To compare this practice to “spam” or “identity theft” generates unnecessary alarm among consumers.

Like those social networks – including Facebook and MySpace – Tagged allows its users, if they choose, to import their email contacts from any of four popular email services (Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail or AOL Mail) to identify contacts that are already members of Tagged and to invite their contacts (including non-members) to join their network on Tagged.

The Attorney General asserts “Tagged did not clearly and conspicuously disclose to these members that these email invitations would be sent on their behalf.” The fact is that Tagged users are given clear notice at every step of the registration process, if they choose to import and invite their contacts they must affirmatively enter their email password and are able to choose which contacts they do not wish to invite before any email invitations are sent from Tagged on their behalf.

We began testing a new registration process, based on our popular Tags photo-sharing feature, in early June. Unfortunately, some members complained that they had inadvertently elected to send invitations to all the contacts they had uploaded. From this feedback we learned that, simply put, it was too easy for people to quickly go through the registration process and unintentionally invite their friends to join them on Tagged.

Upon receiving complaints, we stopped using this new registration process. We then emailed all new members who had sent invitations, explained that some people had unintentionally invited their contacts, and offered information on how to manage their contacts and, if they wanted, how to cancel their membership.

Let the facts speak for themselves. Here are screenshots of the registration and invite-a-friend process that Attorney General Cuomo has brought into question.

Cuomo’s statement goes on to assert that Tagged “made their invitational emails appear to have been sent directly from members’ personal email accounts, instead of from Tagged.com.” We believe the Attorney General is referring to the common practice of virtually all websites that offer an “invite- or forward-to-a-friend” option where the name and email address of the person who has chosen to forward content is used as the “From:” line. This is precisely the method used by companies such as The New York Times and by the New York State government itself. Tagged, in fact, clearly identifies itself as the sender of all emails, but some email service providers do not display full header information to email recipients as a default.

We appreciate that the Attorney General was forthcoming in noting that Tagged “suspended its email marketing campaign in June, in response to user complaints and criticism,” but failed to note that we did so quickly and voluntarily, and well before the Attorney General notified Tagged that it was conducting an inquiry of its business..

We are very confident that once the Attorney General considers all of the facts, we will be able to resolve this matter amicably.

Once again, we sincerely apologize for any embarrassment or frustration people experienced. Tagged is a place where tens of millions of people hang out with friends and meet new people. We have members who have met and now are best friends. We have members who met on Tagged and are now engaged or married. To those affected, I hope you will give us a second chance and join the millions of people who love Tagged and use it everyday.

Today we issued the following statement in response to an announcement made by Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General.

“Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening. Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard. As a social networking company, our membership is built on word of mouth. Friends invite their friends to join — this has been standard practice among all social networking sites for over five years. When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our “invite your friends” language was confusing. The registration drive generated some complaints and as a business that succeeds or fails based on word of mouth, we took every complaint very seriously. We immediately stopped using this registration process, before being contacted by the Attorney General’s office. In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience or frustration that these people experienced.”

For background information, please refer to this previous post: http://blog.tagged.com/?p=4

Here at Tagged, we are fortunate to have a passionate community of content contributors among our over 80 million members worldwide. We saw this firsthand with our Tags feature which lets members select Tags from a common library and post them to their friends’ profiles. We relaunched Tags in January with an initial library of about 200 different Tags designed in-house and we also let members submit their own Tags for inclusion in the library. We’ve had this idea for a while now – and in fact recently received a patent titled “User created tags for online social networking” – so it was great to see this vision implemented earlier this year.

I am now thrilled to report that in less than 6 months our passionate members have grown our library from 200 to over 200,000 Tags! I want to personally send a big thank you to all members who have submitted Tags and encourage others to do so as well. Tags is now one of our most popular features with millions sent every day and it would not have been possible without you. We will be announcing some exciting new ways to contribute content soon and, in the meantime, here are some of our favorite Tags: