Just as if email spam wasn’t enough
Good thing with email spam is that it can be filtered in background without much effort. I just received some real targetted snail mail spam. Some canadian registrar noticed one of my domains was going to expire in around 6 months. I received a letter proposing me to renew with them. I’ve never heard of that company before. This kind of customer friendly service seems to have a price. They charge twice as much as my current registrar, and it’s not the cheapest around (I’m just one of those clients who wouldn’t bother switching for a few bucks).
On a not-so-unrelated topic. I read last month’s IEEE Spectrum closing article (in the printed version, it’s the closing article… online it’s just an article) today and the guy was making parallels between people who abuse the commons (which includes spammers). It reminded be of the entire buzz around Web 2.0. Marcus Whitney has been speaking about this quite a lot lately. I also feel this Web2.0-rich-application-buzz is getting saturated. It’s everywhere and everyone is jumping in before it sinks. As Robert W. Lucky explained, the people jumping in are making it sink. It was flashy when Google released Google Maps and GMail, but everyone has been copying those ideas ever since. I hope this is not going to create an other .com bubble. Is it all needed anyway? Why does everything has to be pushed towards the browser? I can understand for tools that require collaboration, and it also makes the IT guy’s life easyer, but I think desktop applications for reading emails and blogs are still far better. I’m quite satisfied with the Web 1.0 applications (even though I’m not certain on where the Web version change was made).