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Editor, writer, and developer. I wear many hats, including the red one. Graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism; long-time interest in all things geeky. Editor of Red Hat Magazine and grizzled industry veteran, including time as an archivist for SunSITE UNC (now ibiblio.org) and ten-plus years at my current gig. I love:
- vidya games and other dubious online experiences (Second Life, WoW, DDO, Rift--started out with Zork, IRC, and old-school BBS and MUDD/MOO/etc. groupings... old school nerd!)
- cooking, crafting, and creativity
- smart people
- openness, transparency, honesty, and trust
- coffee in all its delicious forms
I loathe:
- giving the web a version number
- social media "experts" (who send me spam)
- proprietary thinking about thoughts and ideas
- soggy cake or bread
- greed, selfishness, and a lack of humility
Authored Comments
I respectfully disagree--I think there's an actual technical difference between FB-style comms and standard email. And, as Paul's nodded to, that difference is in how well (and how easily) you can control the datastream.
I have a fair number of friends on FB. Not 5,000, no, but a few hundred. Paul, I would imagine, has quite a few more. But you are right--that number is dwarfed by the number of people who have the ability to send me email--because that number is, well--what's the population of the world today? ;P
Even if I filter my email (and I do, both custom rules and general spam filters either provided by my employer or the hosting entity), someone still has to either (a) mail me once or (b) be well-known enough to trip the blacklist. Otherwise, they're going to slip through. And crafty spammers never use the same ID twice--often spoofing or mimicking known addresses, or simply rotating through randomly-generated ones.
Now, are technologies for spamming going to shift--will these n'er-do-well advertisers find ways to worm themselves into my FB (or identi.ca or whatever) inbox? Possibly. Am I still going eyeball-tied to some kind of ad-revenue-generating bit? Probably. It all evolves and we evolve with it. I see this as merely another avenue for thought about evolution.
And, granted, limiting my communication to /only/ something controlled with as tight of a gate as my FB settings (friends only, TYVM) would lead me to miss a lot of good stuff I might like to see. But if the cost of that occasional good stuff is the 23--wait, 24--pieces of spam (since 8 a.m. this morning, on only one account, and yes, it is all true unsolicited spam of the spammiest sort)... well, maybe I don't miss the "good stuff" all that much.
Or maybe I find other ways to get that good stuff--like through a mailform or other kind of gateway I can better control or at least outfit with a captcha or other human-certifying process.
And, as you say, Gary, swapping one service for another isn't really what we want to be doing here--but it's an attempt to test-drive and find the venue that fits as many of the 'have-to-haves' as possible with as few of the downsides. That we can use as long as possible... before the next wave hits.
<p>Yes, I've had to do this a few times. But I always miss somebody I didn't mean to lose touch with. And re-subscribing to all the lists and sites I do want to retain is a pain.</p><p>And if it's an account I've used professionally, it's often printed on reference material or published with work I've done. I need those addresses to stay clean, but once they get out there, they get dirty.</p><p>The hope, I think, is to get to a point where you don't have to dump an identity in order to keep it from getting overrun with junk. And you can choose to be out there, but better control what comes in.</p>