Ask HN: What do you think of prepopulation to seed a service?

This idea of pre-populating a web service with information from people and companies seems to be growing. One company that has done a nice job of this is teachstreet.com. They allow people to recommend teachers. That recommendation then results in a stub of a page for that educator with their name and the review the recommending person submitted for the teacher's class. The teacher gets an email indicating that they've been recommended. They then visit this site and can claim the page or delete it if they do not want it posted. Once they claim it they then have a number of nice tools to use to help them gain more students etc. Zillow.com also does a nice job of this. They gather all the publicly available information for your house, tie it to bing's bird's eye view, and even include an estimate on what your house is worth. Like with teachstreet, you can then "claim" your house and modify the listing if you are trying to sell your home. One more example: Seth Godin recently prepopulated/gathered information from the Web on a number of brands. Many felt that he went too far and accused him of brandjacking (http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=139261).

One clear value in pre-population is that you can provide users/institutions with free tools that they don't currently have. They might feel awkward about going to a site that has their information posted (w/out their acknowledgement), but then feel pleased to discover the tools you are offering. On the other hand, they might feel wronged and just want to delete the account.

The question is: Do we do more harm than good with prepopulating user and institution information?

To put this in a bit more context, we are considering prepopulating school information at www.nixty.com. Basically, we'd provide a nice home page, file-sharing area, announcement area etc. In addition, we'd give people the option of launching a LMS (think Blackboard). The LMS would be free to start, but cost more as the institution added more users.