Social Glass

A co-worker showed me a neat little trick that will allow me to tell which companies sell or distribute my email address to spammers marketers.  Known as Sub-Addressing, the SMTP specification allows for the insertion of a tag, preceeded by a “+”, into my email address.  And it’s this tag that will lead us to victory against the spammers.

Say, for example, I want to go a New Year’s Eve party and the only way I could do that was by registering on dodgynyesite.com, a suspicious looking website.  “Email Address” is a required field on dodgynyesite.com.  So, knowing about the Sub-Addressing feature, I enter “jeremy.thomas+dodgynyesite@socialglass.com” as my address.  The part in green is the tag, and is completely arbitrary.

dodgynyesite.com sends a confirmation to jeremy.thomas+dodgynyesite@socialglass.com, and I receive that email in my inbox where it appears with the rest of my jeremy.thomas@socialglass.com emails.

One day later, an email to jeremy.thomas+dodgynyesite@socialglass.com arrives from “julie@guiltypleasurz.com”.  I now know that dodgynyesite.com gave my email address to the “julie”.

I’m now in a position to do two things:

• Report the dodgynyesite.com as a spammer to the FTC (might be harsh).
• Apply a filter so that all messages to jeremy.thomas+dodgynyesite@socialglass.com go straight to my Spam or Trash folders.

Let me know how you go.

I was searching for a Google Reader notifier the other day when I stumbled across Google Alerts (I ended up using this firefox extension for the notifier). I read the FAQ and could instantly see the value something like this could add to the “Signals” aspect of the Enterprise 2.0 SLATES meme. Here’s how it works:

1. Enter a search term for a topic that you’d like to be notified of (i.e. “Enterprise 2.0″).
2. Select how often you’d like to be notified.
3. Google will then send you an email with content items pertaining to your topic (videos, blogs, news articles etc.).

Very simple. Very powerful.

Within the enterprise, search is a very under-exploited capability. Why not take advantage of enterprise search and augment the signals capability to do exactly what Google Alerts does – contextual notification. Instead of creating an RSS subscription to the tag “marketing” or to a knowledge worker’s marketing blog, why not let the search engine do the work and determine what is “marketing”? In this way the user does not depend on other user’s tagging ability or new blog posts on the topic. And the powerful algorithms already trusted to deliver relevant search results will be the same used to keep the knowledge worker up to date on a topic in near real-time.