Lancer Kind

We’ve all received spam from social network sites–classmates, facebook, myspace, linked-in, gmail invitations, … etc.

The interesting thing about this kind of spam is that it’s really your friends spamming you: they sign up for a site, and the site collects your friend’s addresses and sends them spams so they can sign up and be cool too.  It’s a strange system.  We all hate spam, but we’ve all spammed each other.

Recently, a friend spammed me about GoodReads.  Being a writing/reading/publishing geek, Good Reads looked like my kind of site so I went ahead and signed up.  Good Reads also dug through my address book and suggested that a site this cool would be just the thing that all my friends would be interested.  I sat there at my keyboard, and thought about it, about the many of my friends who did read and about some of them which read little.  Then I realized there was only one responsible thing to do: spam them because if they weren’t reading, then maybe this would little spam would save their intellectual lives.

Great!  So I did it.  I mercilessly spammed them all:

Yeah, yeah, it’s another one of those damn social networking invites that you keep getting from your “friends.”  Well, maybe you’ll like this one.  It’s about reading rather than hitting up each other for dates or jobs.  I’m sure you’re already linked into one of those by now.

Here is the boiler plate:

I’d like to connect with you on Goodreads so we can share book recommendations.

After I did that, I was surprised because the system *really* spammed them.  I mean it dug so deep into my address book it was contacting people from the relationship equivalent of the Precambrian eon.

Then an interesting thing happened.  For the next two weeks I received emails from people who I hadn’t heard from since the said “Precambrian.”  It was really cool to to reconnect!

Maybe spam, or at least this “white” spam (as opposed to the black arts or “black” spam) isn’t all that bad.