Sunday, May 11, 2008
As the Net gets older, is it losing its soul, or just growing up?
Aug 1, 2001 | Last Wednesday, I logged on to check my e-mail, happily expecting some 25 to 30 birthday greeting messages from complete strangers. About half, I assumed, would be cleverly (or not-so-cleverly) disguised spam, but I could also count on at least a dozen or so genuine salutations. I had, after all, been signed up on Thomas Boutell's World Birthday Web for six years.
But there was zip. Not a one. No cheerful felicitations from the Ivory Coast or South Korea. Not even a pathetic "happy birthday now why don't you sign up for my joke-a-day service" come-on. Instead, a b-day void, a black e-mail hole.
Where had all my birthday greetings gone? It wasn't as if the World Birthday Web were some kind of post-IPO dot-com that had suddenly foundered. It was a simple little Web site where you could register your birth date. I immediately e-mailed Boutell, a programmer of some renown on the Net, the maintainer of the FAQ for the World Wide Web and author of the PNG compression format for digital images.
"We closed down the WBW because it generated vastly more complaints than compliments," said Boutell. "Even though we always did what we could to maintain the privacy of the participants, there was no way to guarantee it wouldn't be used as one vast spam database by sufficiently skilled spammers, without removing the ability to contact people altogether.
"Also, it was an expense with no real business purpose for us, although we could have continued to cheerfully tolerate that if it weren't for the spam problem. The site had a loyal following, but not a commercially viable one that could have justified the pain of dealing with the stream of complaints. That's life on the Net these days, unfortunately."
The demise of the World Birthday Web reminded me of a nagging irritation that was also manifesting itself in my e-mail box, although in this case it was the presence of e-mail, and not the absence, that was the problem. Around the same time I signed up on the World Birthday Web, I also asked a service called UrlMinder to let me know whenever the content on a particular page changed. Andrew Schulman, an editor at O'Reilly & Associates, was writing an interesting series about Windows 95. But he didn't update very often, so the UrlMinder service, from a company called NetMind, seemed useful -- exactly the kind of thing the Net would be really good at.
Flash forward to the year 2001. Every few weeks I get a "reminder" notice from a company called Mind-it (a subsidiary of Puma Technology, which purchased NetMind) telling me, "We just wanted to let you know that we are still monitoring these pages for you, even though we haven't detected any changes lately." And underneath this oh-so-helpful reminder is a nice little advertisement for MasterCard or some other commercial entity. Need I emphasize how this "service" is now giving me precisely the opposite of what I signed up for? I don't think so.
With these two incidents serving as fuel, it would be easy to start ranting about the death of the Net. Forget about all the dead dot-coms, the crippled Napsters, the bankrupt Webvans and the missing-in-action Feeds. When even a simple little thing like the World Birthday Web can't survive because of widespread abuse, what hope is there for sanity and good fellowship in the online version of the 21st century? OK, OK, I accept that there aren't any free lunches on the Net, but not even free happy birthdays? Are human beings really that lame?
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