This is brilliant.

Many sites grow “virally” by tricking you into “inviting” your contacts to join.  The idea is an invitation from you is probably something your contacts can trust… companies count on that trust to get eyeballs and signups from your (inadvertent) actions.

This caught my attention this morning… a user of one of those systems knew what was happening and wrote a brilliant “don’t do it!’ piece – check it out:

Please disregard this invitation because they did it automatically and I don’t know how to undo it… so here’s some word of mouth – DON’T SIGN UP FOR THIS SYSTEM.

I really appreciate that my contact saw this before he blasted it out to his entire network – in my eyes his credibility shot up 10-fold.

Imagine if websites didn’t do this type of thing.