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- a solution for email spamSeptember 26
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My inbox has a fundamental flaw: every email is treated with the same level of “respect” or priority. It contains both forwarded urban legends, and highly critical information related to my banking and financial condition
The problem of phishing happens expressly because there’s no easy way for me to separate legitimate emails in my inbox from illegitimate ones.
My solution comes from a game I regularly play with magazines or catalogs. When I sign up, instead of giving them my first name, I use their company name. For example, when I signed up for a subscription to Wired magazine, I gave my first name as “Wired”. Now, when any mail comes to “Wired Skyberg”, I know exactly who sold their subscriber database.
Here’s my proposal for a solution:
- all email providers become OpenID or OAuth providers
- whenever a 3rd party is asking me for my email address, they must authenticate via my provider
- each sender receives a token which grants some type of access to my email account
- I, as a user, can manage these tokens in any way I choose, via my email provider
This allows me to control who is able to place emails in my inbox, or various other folders of my choosing. It may seem like a lot of overhead, but it would be devilishly easy to manage if done right. The nice part is that the “overhead” can be handled either in-the-moment or entirely in the background.
Here’s a use-cas
- platform wars: a brief historySeptember 22
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Last week I had the pleasure of attending O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 EXPO in New York City. In addition to meeting many interesting folks and letting them know about eBay’s developer platform, I also got to give a presentation on platform wars. In it I explore some notable platform wars, explain where the wars come from, pitfalls of being caught in one, and how to identify bad platforms overall.
Here’s the session notes and presentation:
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. VHS vs. Beta. PC vs. Mac. AC vs. DC. As long as platforms have been a valuable resource, wars have been fought to control them. Eventually, either through trickery, persistence, or legislation, all wars come to an end. By understanding these wars, old and new, we’ll be better prepared to survive the next.
Posted in ebay, platform, slides - surveys give a false sense of directionSeptember 16
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Mark Earls over at Herd recently made a post which comes along the same lines of two of my recent posts. In his post “Preaching Against Survey Data” he speaks out against the traditional ways of collecting market data via surveys.
I recently posted about “sampling myopia” — the idea that it’s unlikely you’ll get a “good” answer from any type of survey or study you create, because you don’t know the full context — and also about why leadership based on bad data or too little data can be disastrous.
In his post he captures the essence of the two posts and my feeling towards the data in general:
…which I’ve always thought a bit harsh: I’m in no way a “touchie-feelie”, “it just kinda feels right”, “crystals will tell us” kind of marketing thinker. No, I think disciplined and evidence-based stuff is the only sensible way forward - we just need better (and perhaps less) research approaches which harness what we now know about human beings and not more and more of the same old stuff
So… are you seeing true, positive progress from your marketing and leadership, or more of the “same old stuff”?
- leadership does not mean optimizing for ROIAugust 28
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Choosing projects based on projected ROI is a dangerously simplistic way of running your business.
If you take a look at the actual acronym: “ROI” return on investment, it seems like a perfectly logical way of directing your business activity. After all, who wouldn’t want to invest in the things that bring them the greatest returns?
The unfortunate simplification in action is that “return” is generally taken to mean revenue or cashflow, which is but one of the important aspects of running a business.
The problem here is that while revenue can be easily counted, recorded, multiplied and divided; other intangible dimensions cannot be. How do you quantify “trust”? How do you measure “excitement”?
What would an ROI of 20% on trust actually mean? Because the intangibles cannot easily be typed into Excel, they can’t be utilized on pivot charts, or factored into equations.
And because MBA’s live and die by Excel, anything you can’t count, doesn’t count.
ROI based on revenue or other “quantifiable” metrics prove to be an overly blunt way of looking at the world, missing the nuanced and very real ways that vectors like “image” and “brand” profoundly affect your bottom line. If you only have one “real” data point, you tend to optimize to increase that value.
This starts you off making very poor business decisions. Take, for example, 3rd party advertising on your site. Investment i
- why can I only SMS other cell phones?August 25
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Why can’t I SMS to a land-line?
This might seem like a silly question, but if I’m noticing it, then other people must be too. I think it’d be great to SMS my mom at her home, but of course there’s no way for her to “pick up this message” because her phone has no screen.
I can’t imagine that this would be particularly difficult to do, many phones already include an LCD display for showing the incoming call number.
Regardless of the technical limitations, this shows a hole in the communications infrastructure.
Along these lines is another list of questions I have:
Why can’t I call a street address on my phone?
Why can’t I send an email to a cell phone number?
Why can’t I send postal mail to a phone number?
Why can’t I chat via URL?
I could go on and create the 5×5 matrix of street address, email address, URL, cell phone number, and land-line number, but you get my point.
Isn’t it a little antiquated that an address in a specific format only allows communication only though that medium?
If I want to track-back to myself, I could ask, why isn’t my personal profile located at http://rolf.skyberg@myDomain.org?
