'Invite all your contacts' options - good or bad idea?...

Every time I sign up for (yet another) social networking forum or business platform they invite me to invite all my contacts...

I have never done this because I think it is a bit spammy to send a generic message to all your contacts - some of whom I know well and others, to be honest, I don't even know who some of them are!

Do you use these features or steer clear of them also? I imagine some people have such massive contact lists this process sends out hundreds of emails - good news perhaps for the social networks looking to grow their user base, but not really such a good idea for the rest of us.

Any thoughts?

Lianne

Re :

Hmm... I am very sceptical of this function and never use it myself.

Many people do it without quite realising what the function is actually going to do, in my opinion.

It makes good sense for the company - lots of good free publicity and more members, but as someone who gets such emails quite often as friends have invited/tagged me/requested I join forum/networking site x,y,z I am not particularly impressed!

Tim