"Email is dead," broods Social Software. The spam is too much, screwing with legit mail, while virii and other attackers just keep coming.
edited to add: and Microsoft just announced another vulnerability, this time to IE.
One solution: the blogosphere. Consider RSS feeds:
By contrast to Lists, Feeds are not opt-in or opt-out -- they are optional. In a decentralized structure, multiple Feeds in aggregate constitute an equivalent function to a List. Authors are Readers and as an Author has a choice to offer a Feed, as a Reader what to consume. We subscribe to people we trust not to waste our time. New Authors are revealed through social filtering (subscribed Authors referencing them). As Readers, they have the lowest transaction costs available for administering their consumption.
Listen to the implications in this widely-read Wired article:
Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client.
Are we seeing a shift of significant usage from email to bloggery?
The real question is: how long will it take for IM and RSS to get broken the way email did?
Posted by: misuba | August 22, 2003 at 15:39
Since spam works for its progenitors, and the net is bigger than it was preWeb, I suspect a lot faster.
How can we forestall that dire outcome?
Posted by: Bryan | August 22, 2003 at 16:06
Spammers are already gleaning e-mail addresses from RSS feeds (Spammers Harvesting RSS) and you can embed popup codes or text ads in RSS feeds (Ready Steady Spam). RSS validators can help some, identifying tags like OBJECT or EMBED.
Posted by: Steven | August 22, 2003 at 20:54