My thoughts were:

1. He seems a bit keen – we’ve only just got reacquainted.
2. Why is he asking me to join him on Bebo – he’s even older than me.

A few days later, the explanation came:

If you have ever emailed me, or been e-mailed by me, you probably received an invitation to join Bebo a few days ago … I wanted to see how the ‘invitation’ system worked so I let it see my Gmail address book, and – you know how it is – when it offered me the option of mailing everyone or just picking one or two people, I somehow managed to reverse it.

As it happens, Paul isn’t the first. Facebook also makes it a little too easy to email everyone in your address book, and several old chums have got back in touch with me that way (or so they say – I prefer to think that they were just itching to contact me but were too shy to say).

One reason for making such mistakes is summed up by Steve Krug, who eight years ago published “Don’t Make Me Think”, the first (and still the best) book I ever read on web usability: ”The main thing you need to know about instructions [on web pages] is that no one is going to read them – at least not until after repeated attempts at ‘muddling through’ have failed.” And us seasoned web hacks are the least likely to read instructions – and therefore the most likely to screw up. 

On the other hand, Paul’s more succinct explanation probably says it all: