Talk Ain't Cheap

When it comes to spam email there are two ways you can deal with it. The first and most common way is to simply scan it to make sure nothing important accidentally found its way into your junk folder and then empty that folder. It takes about a second and cleans it all out, but doesn't do anything to address the real problem, which means you will face the same issue the next time you check your email. That is why I take the far more aggressive approach, which is to mark the emails as a phishing scam, block the sender and if the spam is coming from a personalized email address, go so far as to block the entire network so I won't be getting any more emails from anyone with an @Lawyers.com address. Given the amount of spam I still get you can argue whether or not my methods are working, but I like to think it beats doing nothing. If I knew how to do more I would, which is why I was very interested in the article I saw the other day in which a person tried to email Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and was told that since they were not friends with Zuckerberg their email was not going to get to Mark... unless they paid a fee. Turns out this reporter had stumbled onto the fact that Facebook is experimenting with putting in a price scale which would allow people to spend anywhere from $1 to $100 to bypass the spam folder and have their email placed in a person's inbox, even if that person is not 'Friends' with the recipient.

Facebook says they are doing this to cut down on spam. I can only assume they are thinking people are a lot less likely to send out crap when it is costing them money to do so. On the surface it makes a lot of sense - if your trying to cheat people out of their money than you probably aren't the kind of person who will be willing to spend any of your own. So, yes, this idea would likely eliminate your everyday, garden-variety spam about the African Prince who has an exciting opportunity he wants to share with you. However, I worry this system will actually create something much worse - super-targeted spam. In other words, emails which are just as worthless to you only now, just because the person has a couple extra dollars laying around, is powerless against any junk filter. This probably wouldn't apply to you or me, but I have to assume every celebrity currently on Facebook wouldn't be able to delete their profiles fast enough or risk getting creepy emails from deranged fans. But, successful non-celebrities would probably have it the worst. Honestly, if you were a young developer and had an idea for a killer game, is there really any price they could put up which would not be worth it to know your game was seen by the founder of Facebook? It is every web-marketer's dream to have this kind of direct access to an investor. If anything, Facebook is missing an opportunity here. They could charge even more if they guaranteed whomever got the email was actually going to read it.

I guess there is nothing wrong with a company looking to make more money, but the entire thing does feel rather shady. And considering Facebook's reputation for doing slightly questionable things with the personal data they have collected, I can't help but wonder if they are going to turn around and tell their users that (for a small fee) they will have the option of making sure no one outside of their friend list can email them, regardless of price. People are always willing to pay for something which can make them feel superior. (For example, the girl in your office who can look cute in the right light but still isn't nearly as attractive as she thinks she is will be the first person to sign herself up for this.) Also, this program seems like a more complicated solution than is necessary. Every other email service offers some kind of spam filter, so how hard can it be to ramp the parameters of an existing program up a few notches? Wouldn't it just be easier to work on a way to cut down on the number of people creating fake profiles and sending out spam? It doesn't appear that Twitter has any problems, because the number of followers I have fluctuates wildly as spam accounts are created and quickly deleted every day. If they can figure it out it seems as though it should be easy for the much larger social network.

The only good news for Facebook is that they could also play on people's egos to make sure they stick around. Currently, the site is saying they are just experimenting and there are no set prices as of yet. Once they do figure out a scale with the more desirable email addresses costing more, it would probably take a week before every user was listed with the price of their email next to their name and you just know the people at the top of that list will be humble bragging the crap out of their ranking. Introducing a game which raises the price of your email the more time you spend on the site would rapidly increase the amount of time people spend on the site (and the amount Facebook could charge advertisers). Of course, this does lead to one final question: will the person getting the email get a cut of the charge? After all, they are the person whose time is going to be wasted. Even if it is only a minute that is still an inconvenience, so giving them even 10% of the intake seems perfectly reasonable. (Then again - this is Facebook, so it is hard to imagine reasonable things happening.) Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to actually make money off all those imaginary friends of yours? The most ironic part of it all is the fact that most spam mails have a subject line about working from home and making money off Facebook.