Comments on: RockYou Continues To Combine Spam With Stupidity

By: Rich Wilson

Rich Wilson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:52:49 +0000

How annoying. And I was going to use them for a project. Can anyone suggest a good facebook application vendor???

By: Rupak

Rupak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:16:52 +0000

Gimme a break Mr Sloan, understanding the theory underlying virality has very little to do with success of a viral app.

Also, if I may point out, you’ve just shown a complete lack of understanding of your audience – us – to whom you are talking now. What do you think we care about kfactors or virality or even rockyou’s success? What we see is a booboo anyone could have made, but a bigger booboo only you have chosen to make in defending when you should be contrite! Hope you don’t ever take up a PR or Sales job.

By: @TwitterHR For Future Reference, Use BCC When Rejecting Applicants

@TwitterHR For Future Reference, Use BCC When Rejecting Applicants — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:55:46 +0000

[...] company to mix up the BCC and CC fields. RockYou has made similar mistakes in the past, repeatedly CCing a full list of its advertisers and developers for all to see (much to their chagrin). But [...]

By: Is RockYou Trying to Commit Startup Suicide? | Guilda Blog

Is RockYou Trying to Commit Startup Suicide? | Guilda Blog — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:24:26 +0000

[...] Michael Arrington of TechCrunch also caught yesterday’s slip here: RockYou Continues To Combine Spam With Stupidity [...]

By: Icarus

Icarus — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:29:43 +0000

Is this really that newsworthy? Cmon Arrington, if there’s anyone who needs to worry about ethics, it’s you. This is a blatant attack on someone you don’t like very much. Great journalism.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:13:54 +0000

“Profitable? Fuck yeah. And that’s the only shit that matters”

This is exactly why the US economy is completely f***ed. You suck.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:08:31 +0000

Amazingly, the comment that I wrote was removed. I mentioned that there is some sort of feud between Arrington and RockYou, and that Arrington, with his conflicts of interest and willingness to use his blog as a weapon in his feuds, is not without sin. Even worse, he writes a stinging blog post about RockYou but edits out any comments that are critical of him. What a hypocrite.

I have worked with RockYou and I agree that they lack integrity. But they are one of many companies in this space who think all is fair in this business. The ethical code of the tech world started dying once it started making money and attracting the sorts of people who are concerned about nothing but money.

By: Ro

Ro — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:40:36 +0000

One of the issues managing a self-motivated, aggressive team that’s under significant pressure to perform is that occasionally mistakes are made. We went through the process of building aggregated group email identities for partners and customers of our services to avoid this material issue from happening after the initial occurrence. But as our team and partners/customers have grown quickly, we failed to update those group emails and train new team members of their use sufficiently, which led to this unfortunate repeat of non-BCC use. I’ve asked my team to be rigorous about this process going forward and, once again, take full and personal responsibility for the fail. Please address any concerns directly to me (ro@rockyou.com).

For the individual comments regarding stupidity or arrogance on our part, I accept that as the price of the error (even if I don’t necessarily agree about the arrogant bit). That said, managing a fast growing startup and team (having done this a few times over the past 10 years) usually involves a long series of mistakes and, with luck, immediate, lastin corrections. My sincere apologies to all of our partners and customers impacted.

Ro Choy

SVP Business and Ad Operations
RockYou

By: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:55:00 +0000

yeah, the belkin guy was committing fraud, not stupidity.

By: Yo

Yo — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:34:23 +0000

With all due respect, Ro came to you asking for money, of course he’ll be nice. How many arrogant F***s do you see everyday?

In a VC meeting there could only be one side with all the Arrogant F***s

By: None

None — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:30:33 +0000

made the mistake 3 times. do you work for RockYou!

Cuz you equally stupid. Count “One, Two, Three” dumb-ass

By: RockYou is stupid

RockYou is stupid — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:28:14 +0000

They are just a bunch of young guys running the company. No one knows what the hell they are doing over there. Bunch of Arrogant F***s over there.

check out RockYou’s linkedin profile. You’ll see.

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:17:38 +0000

Rooly/Hugh: who cares if RockYou is a good company? They may be good. They may be profitable. However, they are clearly stupid.

Is it really *that* hard to use BCC? I don’t get it. Why can’t they learn from their mistakes?

By: Web 2.0 is for Turds

Web 2.0 is for Turds — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:12:40 +0000

Spammy? Yes
Stupid? Yes.
Profitable? Fuck yeah. And that’s the only shit that matters. Web 2.0 turds like Seesmic should close shop and give the money back to the investors.

By: shadenfreude

shadenfreude — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:02:28 +0000

Mistakes and accidents do happen, and should be moved past. Patterns are less easily dismissed. Sloppy manangment, poor hiring, and diminishing revenue streams are signs of much larger patterns aren’t they?

By: Rooly Eliezerov

Rooly Eliezerov — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:28:36 +0000

RockYou! is a great company created by great people. We have been working with them for two years and for me, these guys represent the spirit of the new web. They are open minded, they are honest and they are smart. This is an accident that definitely shouldn’t happen, but let’s keep it as such and show respect to the people who work so hard to bring successful new products to the market.

By: schadenfreude

schadenfreude — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:01:51 +0000

Ro’s an arrogant MBA type who made the same mistake at eBay with his comments re: Google. Lance and Jia are merely engineers and know nothing about how advertising works. Combined with a revenue base at the mercy of social networking sites’ policy whims and changing strategy vis a vis the marketplace and you have a doomed enterprise.

By: Michael G

Michael G — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:31:35 +0000

Hello mountain, meet molehill. Yes it was stupid, yes it was a mistake. Outlook’s evil and we’ve all hit send too soon. Get over it. I’m sure you can find something better to rant about than the mistake of 1 salesperson.

By: jason

jason — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:26:06 +0000

I’ve been working with RockYou for quite a while now and I have to disagree that they have no value. They have exactly the same value that a reality TV show has. They entertain and push media to the masses. I will happily continue to work with them as they are simply the easiest and most effective way to spread content on facebook.

ps – everyone is human. mistakes happen. hell, even stupidity happens every once in a while.

By: JoshK

JoshK — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:15:16 +0000

I’d say there’s a bit of a difference between clicking the wrong button and deliberately soliciting false feedback to dupe consumers into purchasing an inferior product, wouldn’t you?

By: Eytan Avriel

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:30:57 +0000

i am sepaking tech with gilad

By: ilya

ilya — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:27:18 +0000

That poor guy at Belkin had his full name and linked profile posted on TC while Danielle gets her privacy (name and email) after she exposing others’ emails. The good news is that she will be able to get a job after this internship is over

By: minsa

minsa — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:51:38 +0000

When the genesis of the company was a result of stolen Intellectual Property… is it that surprising that the company is lacking any integrity?

http://ventureb...ns-first-round/

By: Redacted

Redacted — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:56:10 +0000

Ummm … speaking of protecting privacy … why don’t you just give out her SSN already? Doesn’t take a genius to put together the pieces of the puzzle here.

By: agree with anon

agree with anon — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:18:12 +0000

As someone who has also worked in the social app space I’d agree that the level of integrity on display is remarkably low. This characteristic evidences itself in a variety of ways, including but not limited to a complete disregard and disrespect for users and blatant ripping off of other developers.

RockYou is certainly up there with the worst of them. They are willing to engage in almost any tactic to increase their user numbers. Furthermore, they’ve proven themselves willing on several occasions to screw their business partners in order to achieve their goals.

There’s nothing wrong with an aggressive and competitive corporate culture, but when companies like RockYou raise an absurd amount of cash and then seek to prove the validity of an obscenely inflated valuation, they cut ethical corners. Lance, Ro and the rest of the management team seem to have lost sight of integrity and honesty in the pursuit of riches.

Good luck with that.