mediajunk

Have you noticed that a lot of social sites now offer to find your contacts? It's definitely useful -- but do you trust Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with your email address and password?! What about Fernando, SlugIt and Redface? (Okay, I made those ones up, but you get my point.)

How can I trust these new kids on the block? In short, I can't. But I trust Google. At least, they already have my login details!

So here's my suggestion: Google should offer a "protected contact list transfer service" whereby there's some sort of link or badge I can click in Twitter, Facebook, wherever. The link takes me to a page within Gooogle's domain where I login, and where the contact list transfer takes place. I can then go back to the host page. I envisage this process a bit like PayPal payment integration -- you temporarily leave a site to make a transaction within PayPal, then get redirected back to the site when the transaction is successful.

Better yet, Google should be able to guarantee me that the host site can only access the contact list for this fetch only. Maybe they could make the host site pay for this service? Maybe it could be an API?

Until Google offers such a service, I'm always going to be wary of giving a third party access to my email.

TechCrunch yesterday examined yet another Web 2.0 company called Seriosity that wants us to use a virtual currency for -- get this -- sending emails.

The idea is that the more currency (called Serio) "spent", the higher the assumed importance of the email, thus giving us a way to sift through our messages.

Techcrunch rightly poo-poohed the idea:

What isn't clear is what people can do with the currency other than send emails. Let me convert this into cash or frequent flyer miles or something else, and I'm in (beenz did this). Otherwise, what's the point, other than to amass a stunningly large number of Serio and then spend it on ... sending emails.

Nevertheless, the concept got me thinking. What if email weren't always free (aside from the ISP costs of course)? Would I be willing to pay a cent for each email I send, if it decreased the amount of spam I received?

Hmmm... maybe not just now, but if my inbox spam levels got out of control, then I'm sure I would go for it.

After all, I pay 10c -- I think -- to send an SMS message, and I send loads of those every day, never thinking about the cost.

I send more emails than text messages, about 10 times more ... hence my suggestion of 1c per email.

Is it inconceivable to pay for something that used to be free? Absolutely not. Think water.