I personally hate receiving chain emails (chain mails), but recently I’ve considered them to be something more than a waste of time: a form of involuntary social networking.

You can often see who forwarded the chainmail to who at least for a few steps back. You can see who the email was sent to at various points down the line, and you can see mutual contacts you have, and also you can see who your friends’ friends are, much like MySpace or Friendster, and in certain ways observe various aspects of the Six Degrees of Seperation (this is somewhat minimal, of course, as not everyone has an email address). Interestingly, one of the World’s first social networking sites, SixDegrees.com, was based on this concept.

A chainmail is a spammers dream. If a spammer was to get hold of a chainmail, it may have got sent to (and your email may contain) hundred of emails it was forwarded to prior to you receiving it. In many email clients, replying to an email automatically adds the sender to the address book. If you were to reply to a piece of spam and then to forward a chainmail to everyone in your address book, the spammer could receive hundreds of addresses.

The annoying thing about chainmail is that you don’t want to class it as spam, as it will stop good emails from your contacts reaching you, and you can’t opt-out. Its something we all have to live with, but by people forwarding chainmails they are circulating your email address potentially with 1000s of complete strangers. However, sometimes the entire history of the email isn’t sent (I guess it depends on your client).

We are talking about considerable amounts of people. A recent email I got, which only had 6 rounds of forwarding, contained a mere total of 35 email addresses. But consider an email is forwarded initially to 10 people, who each forward it to another 10 people and soforth. The second wave of people who receive it will have 21 emails in it, increasing by 10 each time. So the tenth wave would get 101 email addresses. Some chainmails are literally sent to 100s of people and then we are talking about extremely large amounts of people.

To put it simply, if you forward a chainmail, you are not only exposing your email, you are exposing that of your friends and your friends’ friends. And I’m sure not all of them would be happy about that. Also, if the email was to get onto a mailing list it may appear on an online archive where spambots would be very happy to find so many emails.

It is not just I who discourage chain mail, it is in breach of Yahoo!’s ToS and against the IETF’s Netiquette advice. I expect you would lose many friends if you reported them to their ISP, though .

Tags: spam, chain email, chain mail, chainmail, six degrees of seperation, internet

eXlinks (exponential links) is a site that Kinetiq, the team behind BlogMad and Vault9, are going to launch. Currently, they are accepting pre-launch sign-ups and referrals.

Not many details have been released regarding eXlinks, but I have been told it will run side-by-side with BlogMad and will link social networking with links, though it will greatly differ from XFN.

The site seems to be some sort of link exchange, where you link to those in your online social circles. The bigger your network, the bigger the rewards. These rewards will, naturally, be links, traffic and readers. While link swapping is pretty Web 1.0, social link swapping sounds pretty Web 2.0 to me.

Apparently, referring users will be very important, so personally I suggest you sign up and start referring so later you can rake in the rewards.

I’m going to be following this project much like how I followed BlogMad. Hopefully, I’ll soon have more to report.

(Digg eXlinks)

Tags: web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, exlinks, blogmad, blogs, blog, blogging

The Royal Mail, the UK’s postage service, has started a service which allows users to buy and print off barcodes which act as stamps. These barcodes cost the price of standard postage (32p for a first class stamp). It also supports Special Delivery, airmail, recorder, second class, and many other different types of postage. Sounds great? There’s one downside I can see: you must use the stamp within a day of purchase.

Using the service seems simple enough, though I must admit I have not yet. It appears to be a case of buying the postage (through a pre-paid account, credit or debit card), printing the stamp (along with the address) out and then posting it. It seems that the barcode is only valid for one address, which you specify when you purchase it; the product doesn’t give you the flexibility of stamps, and it also requires you to use the barcode within a day (as I mentioned above).

Though the product has many disadvantages, I’d personally find it easier to print a stamp than to go to a shop, or post office, in order to purchase one. Also, I expect the way in which it prints the address and stamp to be time saving for eBay, and Amazon Marketplace, sellers (and buyers who use cheques!).

If the service was to make improvements, such as loss of the time restriction, it might replace stamps in a decade or so. Naturally, this wouldn’t be a good thing in many ways as it would result in the closure of post offices. I see the use of this product being minimal, partially due to the problems I’ve mentioned.

Tags: royal mail, post, mail, package, packaging, web2.0, web 2.0, web2, web 2, postage

For Once and For All is a site ran by a frequent commenter here: Azhar Chougle. The site is basically comprised of online polls, with only one running per week.

The site delivers very simple results, and voting is just as simple. There’s a question, you select an answer, and there’s a simple result given in numbers. The site aims to provide a definitive poll : the results are straightfoward and conclusive, and while the results are straightforward, I wouldn’t exactly call Which is better? Mac or PC definitive nor would I call the answer conclusive.

I believe the first answer, Mac or PC, was a little boring. We all know the answer (apart from those 55 who voted for PC)!

The site does have a simple design which utilisizes some simple, yet nice, Ajax. When you vote, the page does not reload. However, there is a quite large lag between pressing vote and the vote being registered. Also, I’m not sure if there are sufficient mechanisms in place to prevent against multiple votes.

Users can suggest polls by simply adding a comment to this post.

Tags: For Once and For All, Ajax, Web2.0, web 2.0, web2, web 2, polls

BlogMad has undergone a number of long awaited changes. I am a big supporter of BlogMad, being a moderator there and blogging about it very early on its existence. The site has gone a long way in the 11 months of my membership, being mentioned in over 4000 blog posts! I believe it is BE‘s largest competitor.

BlogMad, until recently was owned by a group called RKKi and was administrated by a volunteer group called badc0de. However, it has now (alongside with RKKi’s other large site, Vault9) been acquired by a new Web 2.0 company called Kinetiq, which seems to be full of many badc0de team members like Paul Kain.

Unlike most other blog traffic exchanges, BlogMad has not sold credits. However, they have now started selling credits at the very reasonable cost of $0.01 per credit (meaning 1 cent = 1 visitor), and 50k will be initially up for sale. This is as a result of requests of many members. A logical question to ask is: with a 1:1 ratio, how can this work? The answer is the fact the site takes small fees in credits when using banners, text links, playing games and VARB and BlogMad Blocks (mentioned below) also helps.

BlogMad has also launched block.blogmad.net where members sumbit a 200×200 square representing their blog, it may be a sketch, piece of artwork or screenshot. The price per click on a block is 1 credit, and blocks are rated with the best one being given a credit bonus

Also they have a redesigned shoutbox, which has a lot more eyecandy and supports private messaging. This is powered by PHPFreeChat. This shoutbox appears to lack the lag the old one had.

Both the shoutbox and BlogMad Blocks use some nice Ajax.

The improvements made to BlogMad are quite good, as they appear to be not only trying to raise the identity of BlogMad, but to improve the community.

Tags: web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, blogging, blog traffic exchanges, traffic exchanges, blogs, blog, blogmad, blogexplosion