Consider this irony: Yahoo! spent millions on a campaign to promote the slogan �Do you Yahoo!?� And sure enough, people everywhere now use the name of a search engine as a verb. Sadly for Yahoo!, that verb is �Google.�
The lesson from this trumping of one of the Web�s great brands goes far beyond search. It is simply this: Let the market do the work. There�s no point in trying to anticipate what people will think or what they will want when you can just sit back and watch their behavior instead. So while Yahoo! hired a small army of librarian types to organize Web sites, Google let the Web speak for itself, using software to extract relevance and rank from the billions of links already out there. From Gnutella to guerrilla wireless nets, the most transformative emerging technologies and services are the ones finding ways to have the masses do the heavy lifting.
BLASTING JUNK MAIL ONE CLICK AT A TIME
Now this distributed power is being aimed at the thorniest online problem of all: spam. So far, most spam-fighting efforts have depended on two techniques: software that uses preprogrammed rules to spot unsolicited email, and teams of professional screeners who serve as an early-warning system. The problem with both approaches is that they either work too well, blocking legitimate email, or not well enough. Catching 75 percent of spam may sound impressive, but in a world where the supply is effectively infinite, the result can still be an inbox full of penis enlargement offers.
It doesn�t have to be that way. Every day, millions of people do their own spam filtering, wading through their inboxes and deleting the offending items unread. Think of each press of the Delete button as information — a data point saying, �This email is spam.� If there were a way to capture those signals and share them, the aggregate spam-catching power of the world�s email users could be unbeatable.
That�s the theory behind Cloudmark, a new company started by Jordan Ritter, who cofounded Napster, and Vipul Ved Prakash, who created the largest open source spam-killing project. The San Francisco firm has launched a service called SpamNet that�s already showing some of the best spam-filtering performance yet — better than 90 percent in some tests.
SpamNet works as an add-on to Microsoft Outlook (versions for other email readers are coming). It appears as a Spam folder and two taskbar buttons: Block and Unblock. If spam makes it to your inbox, you click Block. As the Blocked email is transferred to the Spam folder, the software sends a �fingerprint� of the message to SpamNet�s servers, identifying it as suspect mail. If legitimate email is wrongly flagged as spam, choose Unblock to transmit a thumbs-up vote. Users earn a �karma� score, which determines how much weight their votes get; the more often you vote with the majority, the higher your score. Once the score on any particular message reaches a predetermined threshold, the tally gets sent to all users. The SpamNet software filters accordingly.
This is an example of what�s possible when firms �leverage a tiny little bit of human power at the edge of the network,� says Karl Jacob, Cloudmark�s CEO. Each user�s contribution is negligible, but in aggregate they are potentially more powerful than any centralized service. �We�re on the verge of a great change on the Web, an evolution from silo companies that own data and customers to one where it�s all distributed.� Napster and eBay both follow distributed models, as does Jacob�s previous firm, Keen, a marketplace of experts available for live advice. But SpamNet takes this to the mouse-click level.
The free (for now) service, which started this summer, attracted more than 20,000 users by its second week. As its population grows, so will SpamNet�s abilities: Like many of the best Internet technologies, it thrives on economies of scale, benefiting from the power of network effects. With each new member, the fraction of users who need to see and flag a bit of spam before the service can block it for everyone else shrinks. The system, having found a way to extract signals from the Internet collective, becomes increasingly accurate as its statistics improve. It acts more and more like an efficient market. More democratic. Fairer and faster. Today, deleting spam is a chore; tomorrow, it could be a killer act of protest.
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