Tech Glory Days (stuff that gets spammed)

cc licensed flickr photo shared by natebeaty

I had a friend was a big dot com player
back in the bubble
He could throw that IPO by you
Make you look like a fool boy
Saw him the other night at this coffee bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside sat down had a few lattes
but all he kept talking about was

Glory days well they’ll pass you by
Glory days in the flash of Scoble’s eye
Glory days, glory days

It was not that long ago there was this new digital technology that came out that felt like it was going to revolutionize the way we connect and communicate. It was first in the hands of the geeks that invented it, and a few of their friends, and as it spread, slowly at first, then with downhill speed acceleration, it seemed like it would keep that civility and respect that was there at the start.

But alas, it was not to be..

It began to be used by business- often in innovative ways, but at the same time, it got darker. People, in their human nature, began to exploit the trust that has inherent at first, and infiltrated it with tricks to gull you into doing something you did not want, aiming to pry a few micro payments from you. The old guard moved on to other things, and people eventually grew into a state of fear, fatigue, and mistrust.

Some held on to the “Glory Days”.

And that, my blog friends, was …. email.

The scourge of many of our existence, with spam, phishing, filters, entire industries devoted to assist you to reach some nirvana of emptiness.

And so it is one of the most prophetic sayings of this current digital age, the Shirkyism that “social software is stuff that gets spammed.”

With a curious wonder then, turning this around, is stuff that doesn’t get spammed not social software? Or just not yet social enough but eventually it will?

So fast forward the email history to twitter.

Did you really think it would to not get exploited? fouled? pissed in?

Let me tell you about some of the great new “people” I met on twitter yesterday.

Yesterday, I was dashing off updates on some small coding projects and wrote:

Also whipped up quick web tool to reformat some content copied from Wikispaces blog. Hard to explain why. #LoveGrep

My mistake, apparently is using the key, unhashtagged word “reformat”. This is a trigger that means people can spam reply you. Like this “person”:

Hmmmm, was I tweeting about reformatting the PC I hardly use? Kim, darling, I was reformatting text.

But “she” looks so cute and innocent. Clever. “KimChi82” does that sounds like something else besides a gal named Kim? Check her out:

She looks… so…. innocent, sweet. Doesn’t she looks like the kind of person who would artfully create this web site of beauty? (note I am not making any links to it)

But that is a real photo, and somewhere out there is a real young women who is represented online as “KImChi82”?

She has been awfully active, with over 2500 updates, obviously so busy updating on her daily activity, that poor, sweet KimChi82 has no time to follow people.

It is so sad.

Yeah, right.

And today comes more another “friendly” replies, all from such cute icon-ified “women”

Am guessing now my twitter handle has been posted to some “list” so twitter bots can spray links at me.

Of course, if I only used the web client, I’d only see messages from people in my network. But it is important to me to follow my replies, because they include messages from people outside my followers who message me.

And I could be blocking these femspambots, but what;s that going to really do? That is retroactive.

But here is the kicker.

I am not complaining about this. I am not demanding that TWITTER STOP this. I do not expect it.

You know why?

Because this is stuff that gets spammed.

And this is a lesson I really don’t think many people like or appreciate or feel like acknowledging. The digital space we partly inhabit is an ecosystem, a yin yang. You cannot have the benefits, the greatness that comes from the openness that is at its core without allowing for the unwanted, the anti-good, the spam, the crap. You cannot wall it off, or you lose the openness.

Sorry.

FOL.

So with that, me and KimChi82 are headed to Vegas this weekend to hook up with BeyonceBeaut547 and LudmilaAce167 at a Conference for Windows Registry Software, but we’re really looking for martini action down at the Ice Bar at Red Square

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