NOTE: This post has become highly popular due to it’s detailed documentation of how Yaari.com abuses internet users. Also, here is an update.

Yaari.com is an intrusive website and I’m not the first to be complaining about it (see below). But I need to express my view towards it, even if just to make up for all the shameless Yaari.com invites that have been sent in my name.

I have never felt so abused by a social networking site. I have joined many of them in the past. I’ve had wonderful experiences with Orkut and Yahoo 360. LinkedIn and Facebook have been cool and useful. Sites like Hi5, Xuqa, and Tagged were useless, but I still have profiles there. I never felt annoyed by them. I did feel a bit annoyed by Fanbox, because of all the emails it kept sending me from people I didn’t know. So I just deleted my account and asked to stop receiving emails. All done, no hard feelings.

But then Yaari.com came along. I started getting invites in my inbox. After so many social networks, the natural reaction was “just another social network, I have no time or no use for it”. So i ignored the invites like I do for many other social networks. But then the number of invites started to increase to an unusual level. It was when I started getting Yaari.com invites from serious people who never send me such invites that I thought maybe this is something different. Then came the invite from one of my professors! That was it, I had to see what this site was all about.

So I accepted an invite and went to the Yaari.com homepage. Everything seemed normal at first. I was asked for some personal info. In line with recent trends in social networking sites, the info I needed to enter to get started was minimal. There was the usual “I agree” check box. Who reads those?! Check. Next I had to click on “Create my account”. Ok, everything is fine up to now, what do we have on the next page? A place to enter my Gmail login information. I never liked this feature in social network sites, but they are very common now. It’s supposed to help make inviting friends easier by importing their email addresses from your Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail etc. Since I don’t like to bother my contacts with invitation emails, I usually skip this step.

Ok so let’s skip the step. Umm, let’s see, where is that “skip this step” button…THERE IS NONE. I scanned every pixel on every possible page and there is none. This is especially annoying since they DO have a “skip this step” button for another step (importing profile info from Orkut). But it is impossible to skip this step! Ok so now I’m starting to get very very annoyed. I will not tolerate such intrusiveness. I moved the mouse towards the x mark on the top right corner of the window… but then I remembered all the invites… and I was also a bit curious…

I know what I’ll do, I’ll enter the login info, and then I’ll tell it not to invite anyone. Sounds like a plan. I entered the login info and on the next page I got what I was expecting: a list of the email addresses in my Gmail address book with check boxes to indicate which ones I want to invite. Ok so I’ll just uncheck everyone. But there are A LOT of emails in my address book. Usually there is an “uncheck all” button to help out though…let’s see…again THERE IS NONE. Again, this is especially infuriating because THERE IS a “check all” button!!

Still, my contacts shouldn’t have to be bothered just because I don’t have the patience to uncheck all these boxes. So even though i was very angry, I took the time to patiently uncheck each and every check box. It seemed like FOREVER until I was done. Ok, finished, everybody unchecked. So no one should be invited now. Ok so what do I do now? How do I go to the next step? There is only one button to press: Send Invites. Ok I’m willing to press it since I have made sure that none of my contacts are checked. Click. Done. Finished. My profile is all set up and now I’m a member of Yaari.com.

So what’s so special about it? NOTHING. Not only that, it seems to be more useless than the most useless sites I’ve encountered. But uselessness is no problem. I’ll just leave.

If Yaari.com was just normally annoying, I would forgive it for not including the “uncheck all” or even the “skip this step” button. I would have never looked back. No hard feelings, no bloodshed.

But then I checked my email a few hours later. I have a ton of “invitation accepted” notifications, and a bunch of inquiring emails from friends and family who know that I’m not the kind of person to just send any invite. “What?! Another social network?!”, “Mohammad! Of all the people, YOU should know better!”, “What’s this Yaari thing, Moh?”, etc.

WHAA…?! I was left dumbfounded. Everyone, EVERY SINGLE EMAIL ADDRESS in my address book had received Yaari.com invites from me. People I don’t even know, people I don’t even like, people that are not even people, emails of organizations, emails of colleagues, professors, bosses, clients, academics and professionals from around the world, ANYONE whose email was for some reason in my Gmail address book, had received a Yaari.com invitation from yours truly! These email addresses include Ph.D. admissions offices of all the universities I applied to (Harvard, INSEAD, UCLA, McGill, York, etc.).

This is just plain absurdity. Yaari.com has played with my reputation. It has abused me and my contacts. The reason I was getting so many invites was that my friends had also been abused. Unfortunately, I can’t make any legal compaints, because that “I agree” thing that I didn’t read states that:

By registering for the Yaari website…a member agrees to the Terms of Service and consents to allow Yaari to automatically send an email from the member to member’s contacts, encouraging member’s contacts to register for the Yaari website.

And there is no mention of the check boxes I spent so much time clearing. Apparently those were just decorations. So Yaari has also abused my time and effort in unchecking them all to no avail.

Legally, I agreed to the terms of service, and so I have no legal rights to complain. But what Yaari.com has done to me and is doing to others is just plain unethical. It has abused the trust that so many other responsible and ethical websites had built in us through their reasonable terms of service.

I think Yaari.com has crossed the red line. This is too much. Too intrusive. I’m infuriated and I will do my best to let everyone in the world know what low ethical standards this site has. I’m not alone. People have been complaining about Yaari (For example here, here, and here). I have deactivated my account on Yaari and I encourage everyone to boycott the site.