Fatdoor, a website that visually displays neighborhood homes on a map, puts an icon next to each house where a registered member lives, and of course provides each member with a public profile, launched a pilot test in the San Jose area so a coworker and I thought we'd take a poke around. What we found was amazing - on my coworker's block (he lives in the area covered by the pilot) 8 of his neighbors were already registered members and had pretty complete profiles. Given that the site just launched, we were really shocked to see such rapid adoption of users in such close proximity. As my coworker's next door neighbor was registered and had entered her email address so we could contact her directly we dropped her a note to find out how she heard of it, and why she signed up. She didn't responded, so my coworker walked next door and spoke with her. Turns out she never even heard of the site and had no idea how her information (full first and last name) got there!

While it may be legal to display a persons full name next to their property, i'm not so sure it's cool to act as if that user is actually a registered member of the site. The site goes one step further and actually assigns political, among other, preferences to that person. This also makes me wonder if they are pulling our email addresses from public databases to ensure we get lots of the spam we all know and love so much.

Personally, i think Fatdoor has crossed one Fat line! Have some ethics people, well at least when you're going to be caught red handed. I doubt this will a be socially accepted move. Stupid community building act for sure if you ask me.