I just returned after a week away in The Philippines, where Tagged has a big presence, and I had a great time. Kumusta and salamat! While I was away, a lot happened at Tagged and I want to tell you about it.

First, for people who don’t know our history, Tagged is five years old and we have quietly grown into the 3rd largest US social networking site – and one of the largest in the world. We have over 80 million registered members worldwide, and of those 16 million are active monthly and close to 4 million are active daily. Every day, our members make 2 million new friend connections, send 12 million messages, and share photos 10 million times via our Tags feature. We serve over 7 billion page views every month now and the best is yet to come.

Our service, like other successful social networking sites, is built on word of mouth. We’ve grown organically by providing users with useful tools to successfully build their social networks. Among social networks, a commonly used method of network-building is to check your email address book and invite your contacts to join you at the time of registration. This enables you to connect with contacts already on Tagged as well as invite contacts who are not yet on Tagged. At Tagged we tweak this process at least weekly to make it easy and convenient. This ensures that members are never alone on the site and they begin with a known network of friends.

We recently began testing a new registration process based on our very popular Tags photo-sharing feature and we fully switched to this new version in the first week of June. The good news is more than 3 million people joined Tagged with this new process. The bad news is we received almost 2,000 complaints from people who invited all the contacts in their email address books but didn’t intend to. Some complained that our invitation confirmation language was confusing. Simply put, it was too easy for people to quickly go through the registration process and unintentionally invite all their contacts.

Once we started receiving complaints, we hit the pause button on this new registration process. This was done on Sunday 6/7 and, yes, I was on conference calls from halfway around the world. :) We then emailed all new members who had sent invites, explained that some people had unintentionally invited all their contacts, and offered information on how to manage their contacts and, if they wanted, how to cancel their membership.

We realize that we live by—and can die by—what members say about us. We have grown honestly and organically and, if people complain, we must fix the problem fast because our users define Tagged, not us. While it was less than 1 in 1,000 people who complained, even one complaint is one too many; we took immediate steps to rectify this problem and improve the user experience on Tagged.

I am very sorry for the inconvenience and frustration that these people experienced. 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.