April 13, 2008

• What the hell am I spamming?

  A while back everything on the internet was a “post” content phenomenon. I mean that people posted their web pages or posted their blogs or posted their FTP site or whatever and then they waited around for people to come across their content through a search engine or word of mouth or whatever.

  Then things started to change. With the beauty of XML and RSS everyone caught on to the “push” craze. Now instead of waiting to be stumbled upon, you sort of “push” your content out there sending it to the people who are subscribed to receive whatever content you happen to feel like peddling at the time.

  The premier popular example of “push” content is the podcast. Podcasts have such enormous popular support these days that you’d think there never before was a world where you actually had to go a website and find a particular media file or newscast you wanted to listen to.  Rather you just sync up every day and have the next installment pushed to you. It’s like television or newspapers or magzine subscriptions now. It’s less like going to the store or the library.

  Facebook changed the game somewhat when it personalized “push” in a unique new way. Facebook made it so you could push information about yourself out in the form of small snippets of data that would go out to all of your friends in a “feed”. In short you became your own sort of broadcasters. Only the things you were broadcasting were random things like how you are feeling today, what games you were playing lately, what pictures you’d recently uploaded, and your relationship status. 

  I don’t know if it was the first site to build such a massively comprehensive “feed” broadcast system, but it is certainly the most popular today. 

  It’s true that Myspace dwarfs  Facebook in user base still, but although it has made use of many similar ideas in reaction to facebook’s popularity, it is still and always was conceived as very much a “post” system. You make your “Space” and you get others to visit it. You don’t push your space upon others. It’s a fundamental difference in philosophy.

  It should be noted that in a very real sense Xanga was ahead of the game on push with its subscription system which according to the great Wikipedia has been a part of Xanga since 2000, long before yuppie upstarts like Facebook hit the scene.  But Xanga didn’t start expanding on this and adding other things besides blogging like pictures and pulses to its “push” system until 2006, which is around the time that Facebook’s popularity was skyrocketing. There are other precursors of Facebook too, but it was Facebook that managed to capture the imagination of the populace, or at least the important part of the populace. The trend setters. The college students.

  Why am I giving you this history lesson? Only to stress how integral the concept of “push” has become to the new internet environment in which we all partake. It’s a fundamentally decentralized democratic system. We’re all now our own little nexuses of content expression, radiating our ideas and our lives outwards for the world to see.

  In truth this is the very conception of the Internet as it was always meant to be. It was never supposed to be read-only or corporate dominated. Originally it was expected that all of our individual computers would serve as their own servers. We’d build and host our own websites. We’d write content as much as we read others. And it’d be a community of equals all linked together through HTML links.  But HTML wasn’t strong enough to bring about this world all on its own, despite the dreams of Tim Berners-Lee. In the old world those who had the most money to advertise were able to make their pages the centralized repositories for data to which everyone else had to go.  Things changed though with the arrival of “helper” systems like blogs and social networking sites  and video hosting sites that allowed individuals to simulate independent decentralization. You can’t host a website on your own computer very easily or safely or cheaply, but you can have a ten blogs and be a member of five social networking sites and have your own little video blogging world too.  All this is thanks in large part to “push”.

  “Push” survives because users love it and advertisers love that users love it. Basically the advertisers don’t even have to worry about what content to which they are attaching themselves anymore. They just attach themselves to the big content enabling sites. Ala Facebook and Myspace. And then, no matter what content the users are peddling out to their like-minded friends it gets little ads coming right along with it creating product impressions and generating revenue for the companies looking for a new way to reach consumers. When you combine this with the power of context sensitive advertisements, a cash making cow as Google has shown, and you get the advertisers wet dream. They hardly have to do anything, the oh so democratic internet generates the right ads and sends them to the right people who are most likely to be most influenced and least offended by them. And they spread out virally without anyone having to so much as push a button. It’s a total win.

  All that I like about “push”. It’s a great and necessary change to the way in which the internet works. But there’s one thing I don’t. There’s one aspect of “push” that just pisses me off.

  Spam.

  The way “push” works you see is that you’re sort of radiating your content outwards. The problem is, a lot of these sites don’t give you all that much control over what exactly you are radiating. Most notably, it can be a pain in the ass even to “see” what you have broadcast out to the world for others to see. On your feed in Facebook for example you see what all your friends are up to, but it is not immediately obvious how to see what the heck your friends are seeing on THEIR feed or being delivered to THEIR inbox about you. Often you just don’t know. You have no clue. Xanga’s universal inbox is much the same way. What if you mistake? What if you send some information you *don’t* necessarily want your friends to see? Often you just have to suck it up. By the time you’ve noticed, all your friends and connections have already seen.

  And this is particularly annoying since a lot of things you do on these sites causes information to be sent from you without your explicit consent. A change to your profile for example. Or the coming up of your birthday.

  On facebook you are allowed to give out general rules to say this application can and can’t send information to your feed, but if you give it permission or forget to deny it permission you can’t really control what information IT decides your friends want to know about your experience with this application.  And since applications are in the business of expanding user base (to increase advertising revenues) one of their best forms of self-advertisement is to post to the feeds of the people who have installed the application hence reminding that person’s friends of the application’s existence and increasing the probability that some of those friends might install.

  The end result, spam! A plethora of spam. A chaotic monstrosity of spam being flung about throughout the feed and the notifications and the requests on Facebook. It gets out of control rather quickly. And people hate it. I hate it.

  I’ve never had a problem with Facebook applications. I love a great many of them and I love how open the platform is to application development. In fact I think social gaming in particular is the future of gaming. This is the new application development platform of the future. To ignore it  would be folly for any company or person.

  But the spam just grates on my nerves. Because it makes me feel like I’m responsible for annoying people. It makes me feel like I’m sending out email spam letters to all my friends. And I just don’t know when I am. I have very little control over it. It’s annoying. It’s like the application has somehow tricked me into joining in on its heinous acts.

  This, I think is a big part of what has caused Facebook applications to start to be looked upon with a great deal of scorn in a lot of circles. I still think the good outweighs the bad, but the annoyance is understandable. This, also, I think has a lot to do with the negative reception the “universal inbox” received amongst some Xangans when it first arrived on the scene. Same concept. You are an accomplice in spamming your friends and subscribers now. Recommendations build upon this idea too.

  Don’t get me wrong. “Push” is very good. More than that, it’s necessary to preserve democracy on the internet. It just has that weakness of easily going out of control.

  That’s why it is imperative that sites give you as much control as possible over what content you are receiving and over what content you are broadcasting. You have to *know* what the hell you are spamming to your friends so you can feel some responsibility over controlling it. And the more you control it, the better you will be able to enjoy the benefits of the “push” system without getting that guilty feeling all the time.

  • 1:17 pm
  • 5 Comments