Spam on my mind... #TheFutureOfTheInternet
Was reading an article about Twitter and spam in the Guardian the other day and it made me think how much energy is wasted on fighting spam on the internet.
Spam degrades the signal quality on what connects all of us on the net, and is a battle that all the big companies have to fight. Zittrain talks about how the increase of spam, viruses and attacks were one of the indicators that could curb the generativity of the internet. It's interesting that spam can affect the price of the penny stocks that they tout.
It's hard to visualize the spam volume in my email since I use Gmail, and my email is a generic one that may end up on a lot of random lists. But my spam folder hovers at around 600-1000 messages at all times. Try to visualize 100 trillion emails and think about this: 89% of the 100+ trillion emails sent in 2010 were spam.
Even on Facebook, even with platform spam down 95% in 2010, just now I still had a friend that posted a spam story on my wall through a 3rd-party app (the good thing is that it is easy to revoke these permissions).
Mmm... spam.
