Since my post yesterday regarding the supposed “loopt sms spam” ordeal, I dropped an email to them just to see exactly what’s up with their invite policy.

While I was looking around learning the app, there is a button near the bottom that says “Who’s on loopt”. After clicking around a bit, I started getting friend approvals from people, which was surprising because I didn’t even recall sending out the invites.

After asking what the deal was, this was the response I got in regards to the invites:

When you clicked the “Who’s on Loopt” button, all of your contacts that are current Loopt users were auto-selected to receive invites. A total count of people receiving invites appeared at the bottom of the screen. However, we have since disabled that functionality due to customer feedback and confusion. We are working on an improved invite flow that will include an invite confirmation screen that will be released very soon.

The main issue seems to be mostly confusion with their UI. A simple confirmation screen of “Hey, just so you know.. you’re about to send a text message to all these peeps and homies. Are you sure you want to do this?” probably could have resolved a lot of the complaints.

To be completely honest, I actually think this is a far more superior invite system and much more effective then simply running across someone’s profile and clicking add. There’s a 95% chance that if you have my phone number, I’d probably want to be your friend on a social networking site.

I d texted Cait yesterday on twitter so I could add her on loopt.. and our conversation went a little something like this:

Me: Hey, what’s your loopt?
Cait: my loopt? lol as in my phone number?
Me: haha yeah, I guess that’s what we used to call it back in the day..

Now, don’t get me wrong.. there’s still some issues that need to be worked out and I’m definitely not okay with my contacts getting invites without my knowledge — especially with people who definitely do not want to be contact by a third party site.

Loopt is implementing a “black list” but how do you avoid never being contacted by a third party site ever again? Is there a global “black list” that people can subscribe to? Is it really up to the service itself to resolve this issue or perhaps you should just not be as free with your phone number. Or, hey.. maybe even choose some better friends. *shrug*

Either way.. I, just like a lot of you, probably don’t read all of the disclaimers on every site we join. Maybe that’s our fault?

I mean, I just found out that MySpace owns my first born. 16th paragraph, 4th sentence, 3 words in. Seriously.. Read it. It’s there.