Grindr became successful in London and the UK mainly because of some fantastic word of mouth advertising from Stephen Fry. Also because people ‘advertised’ their app on other networks and websites.
Now however Grindr is successful and they forbid ‘advertising’ any other apps or services within your profile. Their now frankly ludicrously long list of things they prohibit at http://grindr.com/guidelines/ is getting out of control. It might simply be easier to publish a list of things you are allowed to do. I think it will be a much shorter list.
“No advertising of services, goods, events, websites or apps.” which means that you can no longer say ping me in your Grindr profile for fear of being wiped for ‘advertising’ an instant messaging app on iPhone called… Ping!
“A link to your Facebook profile is allowed in the Facebook field. MySpace, Twitter and YouTube links are allowed in the About field; these links cannot contain advertising or pornography or they will be removed. No other web link of any kind will be allowed in any of the profile fields.”
Grindr you are successful because people want to use your service – they tend to use other services too – don’t be naive and think that preventing people mentioning other URLs or services means they won’t use them – it just means you are likely to get excluded from the list that people advertise on other site. I used to link to my blog as the about field is quite limited but clearly you frown upon that. The web is all about links and sharing please don’t stifle that. Plus it would be nice to know if you plan to ‘support’ other social networks soon or not. What’s wrong with Orkut or last.fm?
So Grindr thanks – it’s was fun while it lasted, let me know when you are planning to be a little more open…
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