I don’t know how many of you are using OnlyWire. Its a free service which allows a person to post to multiple social bookmarking sites at the same time. It can be handy if for some reason you need to keep multiple bookmarking profiles active. Like most things, “free” comes with a price.

I had been playing with the service to see if I could find any real value and instead found the real reason not to use the service in my opinion. They use your username and password to spam the bookmarking sites, and you are responsible for the content they submit under your login.

You agreed to let them do it.

Most people (me included) usually don’t bother to take the time to read a sites “Terms of Service” when signing up. In the case of OnlyWire, its a big mistake. Let’s take a look some of the conditions you agree to in their TOS. These are direct quotes from the services TOS.

1. You agree to let OnlyWire bookmark the http://www.onlywire.com site AND the OnlyWire Sponsor site on each of the bookmarking services you are participating with. OnlyWire will only bookmark the Sponsor site link one time.

2. The Service is intended for Adult use only. (additional info was included)

4. You are responsible for all activity and usage of the Service and for all content created on, posted to or accessed under your username and password.

Put the above together and you have the potential to have some very unwanted bookmarks added to your profiles and no recourse to stop it unless you quit using the system and change all of your passwords.

Think about the big picture, all the users of the OnlyWire system each add the “Sponsored” site to their bookmarks without any chance to review the site prior to the posting. These guys can get a site bookmarked under a very larger number of profiles in a rather short time and basically without the profile owners foreknowledge. In my opinion and in the opinion of everyone I have talked to about this, this is defiantly Social Spam and may even verge into the realm of Social AdWare.

Needless to say, I spent a bit of time last night changing all of the passwords to the profiles I was testing. I suggest you do the same if you are using OnlyWire. Now I have to keep resisting the temptation to test the other side of the coin and find out if being a sponsor has any real value.

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