I recently committed an online fax paz and didn’t read the eula for a new social networking service called Quechup. And then my entire contact list was invited. Boss from 3 years ago? yep. Admissions officers from Oberlin College? yep. Friends from middle school? yep. So I have sent out an apology to 2/3 of my contacts list and the other 1/3 will get it tomorrow (with contacts names from: 05-Ms) because gmail won’t let me send out anymore email for the next 24 hours (starting 8am today) because of the first 2 emails to over 100 people each. I guess gmail thinks I’m a spammer. Which, inadvertently, I am. And the moral of the story is: always read EULAs.
For more info on the badness of Quechup, see this list of articles. If it wasn’t such an obnoxious site (which reads more like a dating site than a networking site like Facebook) it might be worth examining the potential relationships between popular viral marketing (Apple’s iPhone) and virus’s (Trojan Horses and such baddies). All are meme but some continue because they have apparent instrinsic value and are deemed important by a percentage of the people who receive them and some pass without the knowledge or consent of the transmitters. But it’s a stupid obnoxious site, so I won’t discuss it further.
Inspirational Quote:
“Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it.”
-Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, page 24.PS: I will send a cookie (baked) to anyone in the continental United States who can find where in SnowCrash Stephanson defines “meme”. 😀
