Agriya

It wasn’t long ago that tech pundits and antivirus software makers could think of nothing other than the way the promise of email and the Internet was getting overwhelmed by cretins who were using the Internet as their personal trashcan, swamping every inch of space available in anyone’s inbox with spam and junk mail. Workplace efficiency researchers went to town tabulating the amount of time and resources that was wasted in reading junk e-mail, in dealing with the malware that the spam brought, and so on. At one point, the eastern US state of Virginia even prosecuted spammers with several years in prison; and spammers today are fined millions. Spam has come to be perceived in relation to the Internet, how reality shows are to television.

As powerful as the spammers are, spam is slowly ceasing to be an issue. How did this happen? Did Bill Gates’ idea that you could return a spam to the spammer it came from, and fine them achieve something? Or did EarthLink’s solution tackle the problem – that one could only send out mass e-mails from well-vetted e-mail IDs? Or maybe it’s just that Google and Yahoo, with experience gained from years of dealing with spam, have found the answer to the problem of distinguishing legitimate communication from meaningless advertising? Why, you could say it was the Internet equivalent of an AIDS cure – having the body suddenly be able to tell its own cells from viruses.

Yahoo for example, has an algorithm that looks at how regularly anyone sends out mass e-mails, in order to work out if it is spam, or a proper newsletter. They maintain lists of servers that spam is known to have originated from in the past, and blacklist them. With traditional spam ceasing to be a real threat anymore, one wonders how the people selling discount software and remedies for great teeth, will make their comeback.

When e-mail first appeared on the scene, everyone knew right away what they wanted done with it. Google’s Wave has been around for about six months now; we may know of some obscure collaborative use we personally have for it, but an idea of the typical mainstream use of it still eludes us.

Google Wave is a place that allows you to share documents with other people, work on them all together, and do so with real-time instant e-mail and instant messaging. High-level research students have found a good tool in Wave finding collaborators and critics for their work around the world. Topic initiators set up a Wave to take something up, a-la Google Docs. Collaborators and other interested parties from around the world can join the discussion and post their observations and notes, in real-time. For note-taking, Wave provides options for groups within the Wave discussion: extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and so on.

One application is used to take the place of several discrete ones. Applications like Google Docs can easily bring a number of people together to collaborate in real time developing and debating an idea using real-time chat and e-mail; frequently a collaborator might need to trace a line of discussion to its beginning: with a Rewind function.

Unlike how it would be in a real group, a virtual group like this allows anyone who wishes to slack off to do so without ever having anyone else know about it. There is no inherent check and balance system you’d find in a virtual group that can expose the absence of a contribution from slackers. Google Wave can be a wonderful tool: for those who are self-motivated. As with other examples of modern technology, a person who needs a group to march in step with will have a measure of trouble keeping accountable.

The world’s e-mailing systems were on full throttle even before social networking exploded. At some point, everyone realizes this: that there are more niche social networking presences they subscribe to, than there is room in their generous e-mail capacities for. Here then Mozilla’s new online application for those overwhelmed by social networking, the newly launched Mozilla Raindrop. Raindrop aims to help the socially-networked maintain better control over their e-mail messages, getting to see their personal e-mail, their work e-mail, and other important correspondence apart from the tons of Facebook notifications, RSS feeds, and so on descending on their Inbox. Raindrop is supposed to be installed on your computer, where it will run as a personal web server that compiles all the different messages from all your subscriptions in one place, and shows them to you in a way you can actually use.

Raindrop is an open source API that is intended to be built upon by other third-party developers for better sorting, and better features. To begin with, the application functions through any browser you choose at all: any browser that is compatible with Open Web Foundation projects. There are so far two different versions of Raindrop, and there are more on the way. It isn’t that easy to install it and run it though, as there isn’t a readily available installer yet to make it actually sit on your computer and act like program. There is one on the way though.

Raindrop is not a Firefox extension or add-on; it is a standalone application that can one day hold its own add-ons. Seen one way, Raindrop seems to take a cue from the kind of direction that Google and Gmail have been taking off late, where users bring in widgets for RSS, or chat. If it lives up to what is promised, Raindrop seems to be a great idea by the sound of it: a program that not only brings all of your online messages to one place, but also sorts the personal ones that really need your attention from masses of automated ones. Lets see how well it goes.