Kivus

Over the weekend, it “Quechup” got some press for unleashing a tsunami of spam on their unsuspecting users. Unlike most sites that allow you to parse your web mail (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, etc…) address book, looking for contacts that are already members of the specific websites, Quechup sent out emails to everyone in the address book, asking each person to sign up. They got some negative press for it (as evidenced by this write up on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2007/09/02/quechup/) and caused a number of people to have to send out emails pointing out that it was Quechup that sent out the “sign up!!” SPAM not the individual.

With that as a the background, we have a troubling development on the social networking aggregator “UpScoop” (I’m intentionally leaving all links to the UpScoop site out of this post). Previously, their privacy policy read like this:

After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member’s email address book. NOTE: Upscoop does not email, contact, or spam any friends from an email address book. (http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:uL5Uoiffy6UJ:https://upscoop.com/privacy_policy+upscoop+spam&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

However, today, it now reads like this:

After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member’s email address book.

Notice the difference? It seems clear that UpScoop plans to follow Quechup and start soliciting more people to come to their sites. The question is, will they honor their previous privacy policy or just start mining whatever database they’ve already collected of information concerning users?

With now what appears to be 2 examples of social networking sites doing “questionable” things with the address lists they find when mining address books, I think it’s probably time to stop using these automatic “friend finder” features. I’d love to give sites like Facebook the benefit of the doubt, but it looks like the trend is no longer to use your information to help you connect to your friends, but instead to use your information to help build up marketing databases. I can only blame myself for not recognizing that the later motivation was probably the driving force behind that feature all along.

One issue that most of the web media (i.e. podcasters, tech news websites, etc…) seems to have a consensus opinion on is Net Neutrality, namely: the government should step in and regulate the internet to prevent companies from distributing bandwidth via free market principles. It’s for this reason that the term “Net Neutrality” can be simply defined as “government regulation of the internet.”

Be any measure, the internet has grown at a tremendous rate. Larger quantities of homes now have high speed internet access and people carry a bevy of devices with them that allow access to email and the web. The question then becomes, why would anyone want the government to start interfering with an industry that’s featuring such spectacular growth? Though I clearly cannot speak for everyone, most of the reasons are pretty standard anti-market feelings: the “big tel-co” will start charging more for content to be delivered faster and the “little guy” won’t be able to have his site viewed because it will take too long, or worse, the tel-co will block access to some sites all together. As is usually the case with people who don’t understand basic economic principles, these fears are misguided.

What we have with the Internet at this time is scarce resource. Despite its vast nature, there is in fact a scare amount of bandwidth available for people to utilize, and the most efficient way to distribute this bandwidth with is via the free market. If a company has the financial resources to pay more access to more of this bandwith, then that company should be allowed to access it. It’s simple distribution of a resource. What people normally fail to understand is, there’s a difference between there being “scarcity” in the bandwidth and there being a “shortage” of bandwidth. A common mistake is people are only looking at the existing infrastructure of the internet as it stands now, the cable companies, the DSL companies, utilizing cables to bring the internet into your house. This constricts the market too narrowly however as there are other alternatives such as cellular internet, possibilities for city-wide wi-fi, internet delivered via power lines, etc… that are all in different stages of development. The way people will access the internet in the future has potential to be vastly different from the standard set of technologies we have today. All ones has to do is look at the difference between dial up modems of 8-10 years ago and the speed of cable modems & dsl connections of today in order to see what kind of advances can be made.

Additional reasons against net neutrality include the fact that it’s unnecessary to make a law against monopolistic activities for a specific industry, when there are already laws against monopolistic activities on the books. The most important reason to oppose Net Neutrality, however, is that passage of such as law paves the way for much more heavy handed government regulation of the internet. It ultimately could result in a bureaucracy that controls the internet, much in the same way the FCC controls television. In this period of growth and innovation with the internet, the last thing it needs is governmental red tape.

David All pointed out an interesting article in Advertising Age today. The article did not really state anything new, but reiterated a point that’s been made before: The left has more traction in the Web 2.0 World than the Right does. There is some discussion in the article about possible reasons why the left has gained such a foothold on the web, but it does not delve in depth into any particular reason.

A discussion about the main content in the _Advertising Age_ article will come in a later post, but in this post I wanted to give some further explanation as to why the left seems to have such a presence on the web. I think what most people fail to acknowledge is that the people found on a number of the most popular “democrat” websites are the far, far left; the radical left; the “kooks” of the left. There have been whole books that have examples of the hatred and bile that is found on sites such as DailyKos or MyDD, so I won’t delve into that here, however, it’s worth noting that at least a percentage of the people who frequent these sides lack a sense of civility that would be required for participation in other media. Though they have attempted to use this particular style of venom and personal attacks in other places, such as Air America radio, those attempts have all been spectacular failures.  This leaves only the web as a way to distribute their view point.

Pointing again to the primary consumer of the democrat websites, one begins to wonder why this particular subsection of the Left makes up such a high concentration of the Left’s website traffic. Looking at how different “market” segments of the left can receive information, it’s quite a simple break down. Moderate or “centristic” democrats can turn to CNN, ABC News, CBS, etc… for their nightly news and views points. Moving further to left, you have NBC and the NY Times. A little further to the left will give you MSNBC (who is doing their best to court the kook fringe of the left) but has still not reduced itself to the type of content found on the popular democrat sites. This leaves the far, far left with a need to express their radical views and the web provides them a forum to do just that.

As previously mentioned, a deeper discussion of how the Left and the Right are utilizing the Web, and especially Web 2.0, will come later, but to end this particular post I will mention, that despite all their hatred, the most the fringe left has been able to produce are a landslide loser in CT and a race among Democrat presidential candidates to surrender America’s future to terrorists in Iraq.