If you get an invitation from a friend inviting you to join a social networking site call Quechup, delete it. Joining up and making the wrong decisions in the process could result in the site spamming everyone in your address book.

Yes, Quechup is a genuine social network. But the way it acquires new members is questionable at best.

When you accept an invitation and sign up, it asks you if you’d like to find other people who may be on it by scanning your e-mail address book for people who are in the service. If you use a Web-based e-mail account — Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo, for example — it asks for your login information.

This is common to many social networks — Twitter will do this, for example. But Quechup goes one step further. It automatically sends an e-mail invitation to everyone in your address book, which looks as though it came from you. It does this without warning — essentially, spamming in your name.

I received an invitation that appeared to come from a local blogger. I joined, but did not allow the address-book scan. After I mentioned what I’d done on Twitter, someone warned me about the site and I did some quick research.

This blogger fell for it and wound up spamming all his contacts. He then sent them all an apology, and the resulting e-mail blast caused Google to suspend his Gmail account!

Be smart, and stay away from this site. It’s got serious ethical problems with the way it recruits new users.

Treat No. 1: The fundraiser’s over! Yay!

Treat No. 2: James Kendrick, who runs the popular jkOnTheRun gadget blog and jkOnThePhone, a cell-phone blog on our own chron.Commons, will be our in-studio guest.

James lives in Houston, and he recently brought some of his wond’rous gadgets to a Geek Gathering. We’ve asked him to bring along more goodies — listen in to hear us ooh and aahh!

And, of course, if you’ve got questions about mobile devices — PDAs, cell phones, digital media players, notebook computers, etc. — this would be the night to ask ‘em!

Tune in from 8-10 p.m. Wednesday on KPFT, 90.1 FM, or listen online at KPFT.org.