Blue’s WordPress Blog

I was looking at a query someone had submitted where they signed up to Yuku and claimed that their username was their full name.

They are clearly stupid because:

• Once you fill in your details, the system prompts you for a username, suggesting Firstname Lastname; and
• why would anyone want to sign up to Yuku in the first place?

Anyway, once you get past that, you are presented with a truly bizarre page which says:

“Sign Up
Find friends already using Yuku!

Welcome to Yuku, {Username}!

Who’s here already? Some of your friends may already be members of Yuku. Find out who!
Use your address book if you’d like to check:

Yuku will NEVER store your login information for other websites.”

The page then has icons for Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! Mail!, AOL and “Manual”.

Click on the GMail one, for instance, and it says:

“Find friends already using Yuku!

Check your Gmail contacts to see if friends and family are already signed up with Yuku! Just type your email address and password below and we’ll do all the work.

Please Note: Yuku will never save your password information. We will also never sell any email addresses we retrieve from your contact lists. Please review our privacy policy.”

So what they’re asking is for you to trust them with your GMail log-in details - which would also provide access to Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Google Video and many other Google services.

The privacy policy link is silent on this.

But surely you can rely on ezboard’s security? Well, they do admit that:

“Your information is stored on Yuku’s servers located in the United States. We use procedural and technical safeguards to protect your personal information against loss or theft as well as unauthorized access and disclosure to protect your privacy.

That being said, “perfect security” does not exist on the Internet. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be absolutely secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, Yuku cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us or from our online products or services, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure the security of your information on our systems.

Please note that we cannot guarantee the security of member account information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors may compromise the security of member information at any time. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will always remain private.”

Well we all know about ezboard’s backups and how good they are.

So they’re now asking us to trust them if we sign up with them?

I don’t think so!

Oh and as an aside, my shiny new Yuku account told me I had a new personal message (or at least it would have if I knew what the little glowing arrow meant).

It starts:

“Welcome to Yuku! You’ve joined the ranks of over 15 million people united by communities with free image sharing and profiles.”

Wow! So there are over 15 million people on Yuku? Really?

Mind you, I can trust them not to lie to me, can’t I? I just did with all my Google details, after all.

And of course they obviously aren’t bundling in the ezboard claimed numbers because ezboards don’t have free image sharing, do they?

And wow! I already have 105 Kudos! And Brad Pitt is my friend too apparently!

And not once was I required to confirm my e-mail address to enable my profile. Not that anyone would ever abuse that by setting up spurious Yuku accounts, would they?

You know, I’m becoming increasingly amazed at just how little original thought there is at Yuku/ezboard, Inc. and how much MySpace envy they have.

First, there was the are-they-by-any-chance-related Terms of Use changes on ezboard and Yuku to almost replicate word for word the MySpace ones.

Then there were the MySpace-clone user profile pages.

And now they’ve moved the blog element of what Yuku was supposed to be about to the user profiles … just like on MySpace.

Oh and the next time you’re over at MySpace, try commenting on a MySpace user’s blog entries. Oh look! They have “Kudos” too. I wonder where they got the idea for Yuku kudos from?

Mind you, that’s probably normal in Yuku-Cuckoo Land…

It looks as though - with no sign of the Yuku release on the horizon and the two-months-and-counting silence from Rob Labatt, their “problem solving kinda guy” boss - some of the ezstaff are getting their messages mixed again. Apparently, some people are confused about official and non-official Yuku forums, so Alison helpfully tells us - in an obscure, non-official Yuku forum, which ones are which:

“The lobby is the hub of yuku. The lobby is made up currently of several forums.
There is the announcements forum which is the main place to get the latest information about yuku.
There is general chat, which is not a help forum - but that does not mean you cannot discuss yuku in it.
There is the help and FAQs forum which is designed to guide people to the wiki FAQ, and also help us track when the FAQ doesn’t answer the questions posed. I think people will still seek more hands on help from places like gethelp.

The developers forum is designed to keep track of bugs

The skins forum is designed to help people customise their domains and skins. (Ben, you seem to think that skins did not deal with css when first started, but that is not the case. Our skins are created using CSS. How could we have a forum about skins and totally ignore CSS?) The skins forum, however, is run on a user helps user basis, just like the cool tips & tricks forums on ezboard were.

The promote forum has been only recently opened, but its to deal with all aspects of promotion, including the public community showcase as per ezboard, which is why the beta showcase will be moved over there.”

Thanks for that, Alison.

But wait a minute: if the Lobby is the hub of Yuku, why isn’t it included in the links at the bottom of every page on Yuku? After all, a truly bizzare “Entertainment” one is on many Yuku forums, but not “the hub” of Yuku. And wasn’t ‘Silent’ Rob Labatt’s “Yuku Blog” the place to find out “what’s happening on Yuku”?

Oh and neither of those places have covered what I would have thought would be a very important announcement. Remember at DEMOfall 2005, Labatt told everyone that Yuku was “better than free”? Well they may have dropped that advertising puff as they don’t appear to want to share advertising revenues with board owners any longer, but what they have announced by the back door as usual is that:

“Is Yuku Free?

Yes. Yuku is a completely free online service.”

So if Yuku from ezboard is “completely free”, why are its staff still suggesting people pay large amounts to keep their ezboard Gold communities?

And how do ezboard, Inc. intend to pay for all that bandwidth and salaries? The Google Adsense advertising in everyone’s profiles? Who knows?

Maybe all their new celebrity members are going to pay for it. “Their what?” I hear you ask. Yes all those celebrities flocking to endorse Yuku. Like Brad Pitt who apparently works for them as a coder and gets added as a “friend” to every new Yuku sign-up.

I mentioned earlier a link on people’s Yuku boards called “Entertainment”. This links to this Yuku forum which also appears on the Yuku homepage and must therefore be an official Yuku forum (that Alison somehow forgot to mention…). That appears to serve up lots of showbiz RSS feeds - easy enough to do: I do it on some web sites of mine.

Now if you take a look at the lower section of that page, you’ll see links to “Celebrity Profiles” which just happen to be Yuku profile pages (you know, the profile pages carrying adverts). Apparently, celebrities including Christina Aguilera, Nelly Furtado, George Clooney, Eva Longoria, Justin Timberlake, Clay Aiken, Cameron Diaz, Mischa Barton, Gwen Stefani, etc. have all made their own profiles on Yuku. Wow! I never knew they were so adept at doing their own pages! Or that they all knew about Yuku…

I mean, surely no-one at Yuku would make all those profiles themselves just to attract people from searches on Google and the other search engines to view the profiles and the adverts on those profiles, would they? I mean, that would obviously boost the potential earnings from what is presently the only source of funds visible to the casual visitor. But wouldn’t Google be a bit pissed off?

No, I think it’s more likely that those celebrities have all decided they really want to be a part of Yuku… Stop laughing! Look, Yuku is so good that Justin Timberlake has even started stalking me online and pimping his Yuku profile. Unless it’s good old BJ again pretending to be him.

I’m sorry, but I had to laugh: “Michelle”, one of the Yuku/ezboard Customer Services [sic] people, recently announced her return from a quick holiday to Disney World - cue jokes about swapping one Mickey Mouse outfit for another

But it’s her last sentence that made me laugh the most:

“So, anything exciting happening around yuku?”

Despite her being ’staff’ and therefore being in a position where she ought to know, I’m sure she’s not the only one asking that. After all, that “problem solving kinda guy“, Silent Rob Labatt, has been very quiet for the last two months despite his self-imposed target of “late 2006″ for Yuku being “ready for prime time”.

2006:

322,853 e-mails received (plus the GMail ones).

284,680 Spam filtered by MailWasher Pro.