I have just set up a new private Google Group for discussing and planning a field trip. The majority of the group members had expressed interest before so I just added them to the group. I also sent out invitations to join this private group to a few folks I know from the course. Well, none of them have so far responded by either accepting or declining the invitation. I asked one of them to check her email, but she replied that she didn’t receiving anything.
There are a few possibilities: (i) the invitations went straight into the junk folder (might be the case for the lady who replied—she’s using Yahoo! mail, but one of the invitations was sent to a gmail account), (ii) they are not interested, or (iii) they didn’t bother reading the invitation and simply ignored it.
I suppose this email invitation thing is so alien to the layman I might just well do as I like sod privacy and go head add them all. If any of them get annoyed they could always opt-out of the mailing list. AND THEY DID.
2 responses so far ↓
1 James // Feb 15, 2007 at 2:54 am
Yet Yahoo! Groups have already been around for so many years. I thought most people would have been invited to a group or two and are familiar with the idea by now. Perhaps SPAM email have done its toll and people simply ignore anything that’s even remotely similar to any form of auto generated messages.
2 tin_the_fatty // Feb 16, 2007 at 4:39 pm
You would be surprised that there is a large segment in the society that is not familiar with collaboration software even as simple as Yahoo! Groups. Folks we get to know from newsgroups are far more likely to be computer-savvy than the average folks. Our friend Ray is sh*tting himself right now w/ regard to a IT Competancy Test compulsory for graduation.
Spam might be it, but I made sure that in the invitation I included my own name and the nature of the mailing list. Maybe they just didn’t care. Or maybe if it doesn’t look familiar then it is considered as spam (which is not necessarily a bad thing).