Thanks for your message. We launched a couple of Sundays ago and demand has already been strong, but I’m not surprised that your depot may not have had any SendSocial parcels through yet.

The thing about a service like ours is that, when someone comes to SendSocial for the first time, they might not have an item they want to send then and there – it would be unreasonable to expect that they would. We’re confident, though, that people will come back to us when they do have something they want to send.

If you take a look on Twitter, a lot of people are talking about us, and we’re very confident that as time goes on you will begin to see some SendSocial parcels at your depot.

Keep up the good work, you and the team.

Happy to agree to disagree, I understand the issues you are trying to raise; and with anything there is always a risk; I just really don’t see sendsocial increasing that risk significantly.

You say when the parcel is in the post it no longer exists; but that is just not true, the big barcode on it with a unique number on it is the biggest fingerprint to the recipient and sender the police would ever have. Its important to understand that once the parcel enters our system it does not get ‘lost’ in the system like in Royal Mail.

Ben

Great to hear from you; firstly let me say the name comes from the fact you can send physical items via a social network; rather than its a social way to send things(even though it does have an aspect of this as well).
Secondly quite soon you will be able to send gifts from retailers without knowing the recipients address, this will make it possible to send flowers on valentines day without disclosing who you are(as long as they accept).
Thirdly and most importantly on a liability legal level we have more permission from the recipient than any other courier company in the world; it would impossible to prove a liability if somebody sent you something you did not want because you have given tasset permission for them to send it to you regardless of whether they have your address or not; the same law applies when you receive a libelous email, you cannot sue your ISP for the contents of that email..
I agree some users may act stupidly; but the world would not work and nor would the internet if risk was taken out to a nth degree.
Just imagine if facebook had sat around and said well we should not launch this because it could be used for cyber bullying.
The concept revolves more around a long term vision that physical addresses are become less important in a virtual world; I don’t know any of my closest friends and family’s address because they move about so much; if I want to send my sister something send social is far far more convenient than trying to do the process myself.
Sendsocial is just at the beginning of that curve it maybe a few years before it comes mainstream, but addresses as a concept are outdated, a physical address is wherever I am at that moment and people these days move around more than ever.

Ben

In an ideal world, your system would be great.
We live in a far from ideal world, sadly.

Why take the trouble of putting pornography in the post when I could send it to them electronically using there facebook or twitter or email address anonymously. You would literally have to be the most stupid person in the world to use SendSocial for the way you describe above; a bit like saying people should not be sold cars just in case they abduct children.
The real world is infamous for bullying, the only difference with Facebook is that people get caught because everything is recorded.

Ben

Now, there’s one thing that I’m not getting at 100% about the service as it is now and your comment below reinforce that point in my mind.
The point is, if I know the person email and/or twitter account and if I’m a bit sane I would expect that person to accept the gift only if he/she knows me enough to trust me. At that point I could’ve asked for his/her address in first place… I mean, sendsocial would be a killer app if it allowed me to make a surprise to somebody when I don’t know their address, but this contradicts the service and in fact it’s not the way it works. So the main use I can see for the service (except the thrill of trying something new, but that’s not enough to have a real market to address) is for people who want to be a bit sassy and want to send stuff to somebody they don’t know very well (and viceversa). Possibly Valentines will be a great time for business, think about all the secret crushes being somehow revealed via SendSocial…
To broaden the point (and to link to your last comment) you said that “the whole point of sendsocial is [...] that it protects both parties from disclosing personal information that then could be used for cyber bullying and illicit goods.” That doesn’t make sense to me honestly. Or better, this is not bound to happen anyway, sendsocial or not sendsocial! The person who is protected here is the recipient, which wouldn’t probably disclose their address to a random person emailing them, tweet them, calling them, following them home… well, in that case the job is done
If you see my point, it’s not sendsocial that protects people in the situation you mention, it’s their sanity to save them. And a lot less people are as sane as we would expect them to be, so I’m afraid you will have to face weirdos yelling at you – if not suing you/sendsocial – because they accepted something and then things went wrong. Not that I’m wishing that to you of course (and after all I’m a shareholder too) but I think the value proposition of sendsocial needs to be revisited a bit because at the moment in doesn’t do what it says on the tin I’m afraid…

Cheers
F.

PS: I have the awful feeling that this doesn’t quite sound like the constructive feedback I wanted to give… and if I’m right, believe me that I’m trying to analyse things to make them better, not to be one of the many nay-sayers of this world.