Technology Enhanced Intimacy

Written on 1st May 2009                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Today I received two spam messages.

Well okay, I actually receive an average of 2160 spam messages a day. I don’t actually read any of those because my mail is checked for spam first at Gmail, than at Me.com and finally in Apple Mail. I end up deleting 10 to 20 spam messages from my inbox a day that aren’t caught somewhere along the way.

But today I read two spam messages. Here they are:

I received these within seconds of each other and of course they are were completely automated. I smiled when I read the first one because it is such a nice example of how people can screw up with technology.

My emailaddress is bomega@me.com (yeah sure, send me more spam, I don’t mind) and as you can see the clever developers at ‘CGT Consult’ had their computer analyze that and and conclude than I must be “B. Omega” who works at “Me.com”.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is that it was just such a great example of how NOT to use technology. I couldn’t have asked for a better example to prove a point I want to make.

Technology: Enjoy In Moderation

We all love the personal touch: a friendly word, a hand on our schoulder, the sound of our own name and the bartender that knows what we drink. Unfortunately technology makes it far too easy to become distant, cold and impersonal. It is just too easy to spam your whole address book. Copy list, paste in BCC field, press send. Annoy 1000 people in three clicks. Done.

The trick to technology, the secret, is to use technology to make your life easier but stay personal, at every level. The challenge is to use cold technology to warm up your communication and strengthen your relationships. Sounds easy enough but technology keeps seducing us to take advantage and show our bad sides.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Contacting 10 people personally is more effective than spamming 1000 strangers. Give it a try and find out for yourself.

automated, personal, spam, technology

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Twitter Spam Prevention Attracts More Spammers

Written on 4th September 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

On August 21 Twitter announced it would turn up the heat on spam. They introduced some measures to keep spammers from abusing the system including a new rule that forbid people from following more than 2000 people. Unsurprisingly spammer did not give up on twitter and are now finding new ways to game the system.

On the right here is a screenshot of my Inbox with Twitter  notifications. As you can see these are clearly computer generated usernames.

Twitters new anti spam measures seem effective up to a certain point. Yes, the accounts are now suspended and show a message explaining that this might be a fake account: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity”. Unfortunately the current fix only becomes effective after the damage is done:

It seems the sign-up process is currently too easy to automate and will keep attracting spammers looking for an easy way to reach an audience. The fight against spam will be an ongoing battle for Twitter. But you can help too! If you see a clear Twitter spammer just Tweet the following:

@spam @spammername

That will alert Twitter and will give them a chance to suspend the account before too much damage is done.

abuse, automated, search, spam, twitter

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