SXSW Startup Connect.me Goes Viral & Causes Malware Scare

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Over at SXSW, startup Connect.me has started sending invites to a few people for its just-opened public beta. In a few hours, the site got tens of thousands of signups, even though users didn’t have an idea of what it was about.

Okay, so I signed up to Connect.me, too. With all the buzz, it may as well be the next Twitter. Remember how Twitter reached the tipping point at SXSW? It was a good combination of the right product, with the right people, with the right buzz.

But it seems Connect.me got the attention of other people as well. Since the site was at a “stealth startup” it doesn’t say anything about what it does. And so, given the sheer number of connect requests that users have been getting, security firm Sophos took heed and blogged about Connect.me as a possible scam that mined Facebook and Twitter accounts for data.

And now, it seems that founders of Connect.me and the principals at Sophos are in a word war with each other over this concept called privacy. Connect.me says they’re advocates of user privacy, and yet Sophos calls them hypocrites for asking people to sign up for a service that is unknown.

Who’s justified here? I guess both are. Perhaps things just got blown out of proportion. Folks at SXSW–especially startups–often do stealth launches, and do beta invites, intending these to be only for their local contacts during the festival. But with the presumably valuable nature of reserving your Connect.me name (said to be akin to a domain name), people got hooked.

Connect.me had better ride on this level of fame while they’re at it.

I’ve reserved my username. Either I’m brilliant for ensuring ownership of my name, or really stupid for falling for a social engineering attack. Which could it be?