Web 2.0: Be Careful Of What You Can't Control*

As I alluded in a previous post, my company’s IT administrators in their infinite wisdom no longer auto-forward (to my personal account) email sent to work addresses. Since my personal email address was the only one published by EDN for a substantial chunk (and the entire early portion) of my to-date 11+ year career, however, most of my work-related email continues to get mixed up with personal correspondence…but the work addresses still find sufficient use by my internal peers and enough other folks that I can’t ignore them for more than a day’s span, either. This no-more-forward transition happened right before NAB, so I ended up dragging two different laptops to the show. Unwilling to undertake that particular shoulder-killing stunt for a second (or subsequent) time, I’ve since obtained the token-generating dongle I need to tap into my work account from any browser via Outlook Web Access.

As a result, I’m able to more clearly see which email addresses are getting disproportional bombardment by incoming spam, and the statistics are pretty eyebrow-raising. I left home on late Sunday afternoon, May 25^th, and 7 days later my work account had collected more than 2,000 pieces of spam (versus only a few dozen valid emails). Gmail (the ultimate destination for all of my other several-dozen email addresses), conversely, only has around 100 bogus messages sitting in its spam folder…thereby showcasing, to my dismay, the power of spam address list-generating ’spiders’ that crawl over EDN’s website, extracting my and others’ email addresses from editor contact pages, as well as the bio included with each online article.

Reed/EDN’s email system is, frankly, horrible at discerning spam. The vast majority (upwards of 90%) of those 1,500+ spam emails are ones that I manually dragged out of the inbox (a fine use of time, I know) in an apparently fruitless attempt to train the Postini-based system. At least it only rarely misidentifies ham (valid emails) as spam, though; Gmail has seemingly become steadily less capable in this regard. When I converted from client-side spam filtering to the server-side alternative a while ago, supposedly as a stress-reducing move, I did so because was confident that Google’s formidable cash and brainpower assets would result in an increasingly accurate spam-vs-ham differentiation scheme as time went on.

The converse has unfortunately been the case, in my experience, so if you ever sent me an email and never heard back, now you know why. The reason why this disparity between expectation and reality occurred is, I think, due to a combination of a fairly formidable bug and an equally dreadful implementation delusion. First the filtering flaw; once a message somehow made its way into the spam folder, it was seemingly impossible to ‘un-train’ the system (no matter how patiently and repeatedly I tried) such that subsequent emails with similar subject lines, or from the same sender, didn’t end up getting incorrectly spam-tagged, too.

And how did stuff get in the spam folder in the first place? That’s the ‘Web 2.0′ part of the story. In addition to its own developed ham-vs-spam discernment tools, as it turns out, Google taps into its installed base of users as a supplement. Every once in a while, when I move an email from my Gmail inbox to the spam folder (but, again referencing the earlier-mentioned bug, not the other way around), I get a pop-up box asking me if I’d be willing to submit the spam message for inclusion in Google’s bad-email database.

I’ve noticed (and not just anecdotally…out of curiosity, I kept a close tally for several weeks) that most of the misidentified emails that end up in the spam folder are newsletters. So here’s my theory. Users are deciding that they don’t want to get a newsletter (or some other periodic email series, such as the regular media bulletins from Electronic Arts that consistently got spam-tagged) anymore. But instead of unsubscribing via proper channels, they just start tagging the messages as spam…thereby also degrading the experiences of those of us who still want to receive the correspondence**.

Well isn’t that special, as the Church Lady might say? The Web 2.0 hype machine, I’m increasingly (and increasingly strongly) concluding, is a massive investment bubble the likes of which we haven’t seen in…oh…eight years or so (sarcasm you may be detecting at the moment is wholeheartedly intentional). Will folks ever learn? Well no, they won’t, as long as their actions are fundamentally fueled by greed, aversion and delusion. Everyone’s in the game to make a quick buck and then ‘get out while the getting’s good’ but, like Las Vegas gamblers, most of them stay invested way too long and end up in a fiscal hole.

This whole community-building thing is a joke, anyway. Countless Digg rebellions, for example, make it clear to me that there’s absolutely no user loyalty being cultivated, especially when there’s little to no ’stickiness’ (aka with email addresses…thereby explaining why AOL has remained marginally relevant far beyond the timeframe it deserved to be) in the experience. Remember, for example, the whole AASC key-leak fiasco from late 2006? When a few posts containing the key cropped up on Digg, the site’s moderators wisely pulled them, fearing Hollywood lawsuits.

To which the Digg community responded, in short order, by pummeling the site with thousands of posts containing the key (admittedly in oft-creative forms). Hollywood be damned, the anarchistic mob was going to do whatever it felt like doing with ‘its’ site, even if its behaviour led to the site’s implosion. If Digg members didn’t get their way, they’d go somewhere else…and if the site collapsed under the weight of lawsuits, they’d flee to more friendly (albeit temporary) quarters, too. Loyalty? Reason? Restraint? Fahgetaboutit.

Facebook? LinkedIn? MySpace? Twitter? I don’t ‘do’ any of them, I’m proud to say. Life’s too short, and I have far too many other things I’d prefer to spend it doing, versus swapping shallow ‘experiences’ with cyber-’friends’. Snort. Companies, I strongly urge you to not bet your futures on the Web 2.0 hype. Agree or disagree, readers?

*Not that you can really control anything…but you get my drift…

**This hasn’t yet happened with any of the EDN newsletters I subscribe to, I’m happy to say, which leads me to conclude that you all find them so valuable that none of you would dare spam-categorize them. Am I right?