MetaLIFE: New social networking tool or spam-generator?

A short while ago I was asked to try out a new social networking tool called MetaLIFE. From the outset it struck me as quite well coded, with a lot of thought having gone into it. It wasn't perfect yet (what is?) as it was still hardcoded to use channel 8 which upset other scripted items, including Psyke's security orb, which could cause the MetaHUD to become quite confused (and, it appeared to me, rather distressed) when it couldn't obey the commands it thought it was being given.

But for a social networking system it is pioneering. It allows you to "follow", or track, the activities of other residents (I do have some worries that they might fall foul of privacy rules here, but time will tell) and get little messages whenever someone you're "following" does something. Likewise, people choosing to "follow" you will be told when you buy something, choose to "follow" someone else, comment a profile or other such things.

Originally this was quite quaint fun, and I did enjoy it.

But then someone scripting the MetaHUD made a real mistake in my opinion. They altered the way it worked so that it started sending offline messages to a subscribers email. And worse than that there STILL doesn't exist the ability to regulate that from the MetaHUD itself. Again, it's hard coded. The only options you have to stop that are to stop "following" residents, or to choose to stop SL from sending you offline IM's to email (which in my case isn't an option since I must receive urgent calls relating to SupportforHealing's Listening Ear project). Of course, if you DO do that then you risk getting "capped" by SL, which has a limit to the number of offline IMs and messages it will store.

At present, I'm only "following" one resident who is particularly busy. But that single resident's activities have sent me 11 emails on March 12th, six on the 13th and (at the time of this entry) 4 today. And that's one resident. Multiply this by 10 if it did become popular and suddenly you have a serious email problem. Already due to the frequency, length and content, my Mozilla Thunderbird has started to classify incoming MetaLIFE messages as junk mail.

I'm not sure that it isn't right.