Ever have one of those days where you are messing around and accidentally hit the wrong button and email everyone in your contact list an invitation that you didn’t mean to send?

I’ve had a MySpace account for a while on which I had two friends both of which are my kids. This morning I decided to look around to see the kinds of things one could do on MySpace and found that it integrated with Google Mail to import contact lists. I wanted to see what kind of integration there was, so I started looking around (I didn’t know that Gmail offered API’s and I was curious). It asks me for my GMail login information, and I type it in. A couple of random clicks later, and I find that I invited everyone in my contact list to Myspace! Yes, everyone, including mailiing lists that I read and contribute to periodically.

This is what you get for not paying attention to what you are doing while you are clicking around. I want everyone who received this message in their inbox to know that this was a complete accident and was not meant to fill your inbox with even more unwanted messages.

I have also deleted the account so that I do not wind up with a ton of contacts on it. The sole purpose of the account was to participate in conversations with my kids, not to invite everyone in the world to MySpace.

This was a completely stupid mistake that was made because I was not paying attention. Moral of the story: Be careful when investigating functionality on sites like this, especially where email integration is concerned. Social networking applications like MySpace are really cool, but one mistake can have some pretty widespread ramifications if you are not paying attention.

I want to apologize to all who received this invitation and my lack of attention that caused you to get this message. It won’t happen again.