the future workplaces of gmail spammers

There was a time when life online was simple. You could have several email accounts with different names disconnected from one another and use one for your finances, one for work, one for personal email, one for letting all those "internet people" contact you, one for signing up to websites, and one just there so that you write obnoxious emails to people without them knowing who you are.

My god, I have too many email addresses.

Then, back in June of 2009, we reported that our favourite mail provider--gmail--asked us to input a mobile phone for sign up. A month later the web was a flood with messages and complaints. Many people who do not have cellphones were finding that their text-based medium of choice was now requiring them to have access to another text-based medium.

This week I want to take another look at what happened, why it happened, and what you can do about it.

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A different kind of roundup for the first week of 2010. This week we've put together a "roundup of roundups" so to say, a selection of stories on what the tech world thought was important about 2009, as well as the important trends of 2010. We've got the top techs of 2009, trends emerging as we head towards 2010, and even a little bit on 2020 and beyond.

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As a web usability professional and copywriter, I must sometimes clash swords with Search Engine Optimization folk. For example, they'll insist that a page contain at least 300 words of keyword-rich text... even where from the user's perspective, the text isn't necessary. Bloody battles ensue. And when the dust has cleared, we're left with a compromise page that pleases neither of us (but hopefully works for both robotic and human visitors).

In the spirit of the new year and a fresh start, I'd like to touch upon one area in which we can all be friends: the humble yet all-important Title Tag.

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Christmas is over! With wayyyyyyy too much Turkey left, a combination of bright warm sun and ice cold temperatures, and bruises all the way up and down my right hand side thanks to a combination of my bicycle and black ice, it's hard to think that I'm going to be returning to work in a week.

Not a whole lot going on this week, for obvious reasons. Some emial list building advice, the problems with canonicals, average browser window size, and how children use search engines are our highlights.

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I've always had mixed feelings about coupon codes. On the one hand, they're a fairly simple and convenient way to implement email promotions for subsets of your customers. On the other hand, they have some major downsides.

First, forcing customers to remember codes is clumsy and violates a basic usability principle: don't force visitors to rely on their memories. (Sure, they might be able to copy and paste rather than remember, but that's still forcing them to do too much work.)

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Your users don't want to wait

As we come into the New Year, one of Google's goals is to try and make the web a much faster place. One of the ways that they have talked about accomplishing this is by adding load times as a factor to the algorithm.

We've already seen Google's movement towards a faster web experience with Chrome and load times effecting Adwords landing page quality. Now it looks to be pushed into organic search. The weight placed on load times for organic search will probably be quite minimal compared to other top factors but this doesn't mean that it should be brushed aside.

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And I thought Shaw was bad! Well, this week I've found another excellent contender for the worst opt-out system, and even better the company is sending from the US. Yes folks, a genuine CAN-SPAM breach!

While browsing an old mail account the other day I noticed that I've been receiving regular emails from Codemasters. Who on earth are Codemasters? All I remember is that they have something to do with video games. Their email is an ad for a game called Opperation Flashpoint. I never played this game, nor do I have any desire to play it, so why are they emailing me? Maybe at one point I signed up for an account there and they used an opt-out instead of an opt-in for their newsletter (a bad sign).

"Whatever," I think, "I'll unsubscribe." Well, we know how well that has worked in the past.

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What a week! Christmas is coming and I guess every company wants to get everything finished for Q4 so that they can go enjoy their holidays without worry.

This week we have social media completely reshaping music sales charts, more Google purchases, dealing with duplicate content, finding insights outside the box, the FTC doing its job, Facebook privacy issues… and so much more.

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I ran into a surprising checkout glitch on www.frangrancex.com, an online retailer of colognes, etc.

Having received an email offering free shipping worldwide on all orders (i.e. no minimum purchase), I decided to investigate. It seemed too good to be true.

When I landed on the site, I noticed the banner indicating free worldwide shipping... but no mention as to whether there was a minimum order:

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A little bit of futurism for the day. Yesterday I was reading an article on a blog that I've forgotten saying that Google Wave is going to fail as an email alternative. I'm going to go out on a limb here and agree:

Google Wave is going to fail as an email alternative.

But I'm playing with words a bit here. You see, having used it for a while I've come to conclude that it probably was never meant to be an email alternative.

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