In 2009, SXSW helped launch Foursquare–but are startups today going to have a tougher time trying to cut through the din in Austin?

This afternoon, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that his office plans to sue controversial social networking startup Tagged for “deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy.”

I asked Tagged CEO Greg Tseng for comment; he just sent me the following statement: “Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening. Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard.

A reporter with the newspaper weighs in today with her own experience on Tagged, the social networking site we reported on a couple of times this past week. Surely, it’s a piece that no one involved with the company is happy to see:

Earlier this week, I reported that Tagged, a social networking service that began life as a Facebook for teenagers, has reportedly evolved into a spam machine. I also noted that when I approached the company to chat about dubious recruiting processes, my press requests were handled very poorly. I concluded that, between the two, its high-profile investors had reason for concern.

Yesterday, TechCrunch published a related story, saying I’d been overly “harsh” and that I’d managed to draw a line “practically putting the company in the deadpool,” when the company is “actually humming along quite nicely.”

I finally caught up with Tagged’s CEO, Greg Tseng, this morning, and we chatted about the chatter, as well as what’s really going on at the four-year-old company.

When I was first introduced to San Francisco-based social networking startup Tagged.com, it was 2005 and the nascent company was limiting its service to pre-teen and teenage users. The implicit message was that Tagged would protect its young base from the sexual predators trolling around MySpace (which, at the time was generating a slew of negative [...]