I don't want your mail!
Suppose there is a site (let’s call it “S”) where you can bookmark your stuff online (like boing-boing, del.icio.us, digg, or any other) in a pretty layout. Someone you might know, let’s call him “A”, read about it in the local newspaper and creates an account on said website and decides that he wants to have a link to your website (“W”) on it.
Now this particular site S will create a small picture on the screen of A, representing your website. If they don’t have a picture, they will send an e-mail out of the blue to the webmaster of W kindly asking you to create a logo and sending it to them:
Beste webmaster,Iemand heeft een link naar je site aangemaakt op zijn persoonlijke bureaublad op S. Op dit moment bevat onze database nog geen logo van je site. Om een fraai blokje op S te krijgen willen we je vragen om je logo te mailen naar: icon@S.
Let op! Dit moet een transparant GIFje zijn van 80×80 pixels waarbij het logo gecentreerd staat en niet groter dan 60×60px is.
Help S te verspreiden. Kijk voor de Webmasters tools op: URL.
Geniet van je dag! Team S
If you don’t read Dutch, I am almost summoned to create this picture – specifically for them – according to their rules. On top of that, they’re begging me to start promoting their site for them. Yes, well, if they wouldn’t have spammed me with this I might have thought about it when I got my own account there, but now I don’t have any incentive to do so at all.
Firstly, I don’t care that someone adds a link to my website to their page, it’ll probably be the only person doing so anyway. Secondly, I am not going to do their job. Create a icon for me if you need it, you get paid for it. If its a really good site, people start talking about it and will find your “Webmasters tools” on their own.
I’m sure S is a nice site, but it almost feels like they have started this thing for one single thing and that is money. They really threw together the Web 2.0 buzz-words, Javascript, AJAX, “it has to be personal”… “Oh, yes, we have to add sharing too”… And after 4 months they’re launching the thing, spam around like mad, make newspapers and blogs write about them and think to themselves, “Now we wait?”.
Now, money is a good reason and drive to do something, but on the internet the things work a little different. Some of the really great sites came out of hobby projects. Google was a university research project before they became the biggest threat to privacy according to some, Facebook was a project of a Harvard College student, Digg was an experiment on social bookmarking. Most became famous first and only then commercialized.
So what’s with Symbaloo, they’ve probably read good things about “this Web 2.0” and now want to cash out within 6 months of their existence? Sorry, you do that without my help (okay, I mentioned your name, but that’s all help you’ll get). It’s the way it worked on the web a few years ago and in the offline world, things are different on today’s Web.