« Happy New Year | Main | Another Utah Weblog »
January 02, 2003
Power of many
The human mind has a very difficult time comprehending big numbers. It's easy to visualize 100 or 1,000 or 10,000, but around 100,000 or 1,000,000 we have a hard time comprehending, and between 10,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 most of us start thinking in infinite terms (using comparisons like "you'd have to spend $115,000 per day every day of the year to spend $1 billion in a year"). Some people (like astronomers) might be better at comprehending big numbers.
One of the greatest powers, that is frequently underestimated, is the power of a lot of people doing the same thing or feeling the same way about something. I'm always amazed at how products that sell for under $5 generate billions in annual revenue for the companies that make them.
Somewhere around 650 million users are on the Internet now. That's a lot of people. The Internet has enabled those people to get together in ways that simply were not possible just 10 years ago. The combination of communications, applications and information enables people to find and participate in interest groups larger and more powerful than ever before.
Consider that a relatively small handful, around 1.5 million active Napster users, created the biggest threat to the music industry in its history. Napster did very little (if any) advertising, no telemarketing, no door-to-door sales. Ultimately what Napster users started will fundamentally change the entertainment industries, probably for the benefit of consumers. There are lots of other examples, especially with peer-to-peer technologies.
Spam (unsolicited junk email) has become quite a nuisance over the last few years, and looks to get even worse. In December, I received over 900 spam messages, an average of 30 per day. Not even accounting for the time it takes to delete those messages, they are a big security risk and some are quite embarrassing.
A lot of effort has gone into stopping spam, through technology, the legal system and many other methods. Most of these have focused on trying to classify a message based on the words it uses. Generally, I have found them to be difficult to maintain and mostly ineffective, and they will often miss spam messages and classify legitimate messages as spam.
I have been experimenting recently with some very powerful collaborative spam tools. These tools use the power of a few hundred thousand people (their mailboxes to be more specific) to quickly catalog new spam messages. As each message is reported (usually in real-time), a server tallies how many times it has been reported by other users and analyzes the message to assign it a spam score. This collaborative effort results in a spam filter that is 99% accurate. Of the 900 spam messages I received last month, only a few weren't properly identified as spam, and no legitimate messages were identified as spam. There is also an Outlook plug-in that works in the same way.
Some of the most interesting Internet applications are those (such as Weblogs) that leverage the power of the masses of Internet users. Spam blocking might not be the most interesting one, but it is one example of how simple a solution can be when it distributes the workload. This is one area of technology (and social) development I think will be exciting to watch in the future.
Posted by pete at January 2, 2003 12:16 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry: