[bacn] the new scourge of the inbox

Update Liz Thursday

Apologies to The Age for lifting their article holus bolus but it does say it all. Also, regulars know I don't go cutting and pasting MSM articles but this time I must do so and not leave any of it out.

Today I received an invitation from Facebook to hug a vampire or something. I've had invitations for drinks, to play scrabble and so on and so on, all of them from people I know and feel close to. It was the only reason I followed it up - these were friends I knew who'd also been sucked into this sort of thing.

They'd say it was just a bit of fun and using the tools Facebook had lovingly provided. I'd say, like Second Life, it was a deliberate time waster. Not by my friends, you understand but by the purveyors of such schemes.

Facebook is just one example of schemes inserted into the net for what purpose I know not. MyBlogLog is clear enough - it signals that a reader has arrived and is useful this way. But what exactly does Facebook offer, beyond the spurious?

I haven't time to be doing this stuff - it's a problem finding the minutes in the day as it is. That's why this article caught my eye:

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Just when you thought you were finally starting to get on top of the spam epidemic, a new email scourge is clogging inboxes around the country: bacn. Unlike spam, bacn (pronounced "bacon") is solicited email, but that which you do not want to read right now, or even at all.

Coined at a US blog conference earlier this year, bacn spread across the blogosphere like wildfire and is now part of the geek vernacular. It includes messages from social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, subscribed newsletters, surveys and flight bargains.

"If you're active in the social networking scene on multiple sites, multiply several LinkedIns by multiple Facebooks plus mailing lists you signed up to a couple of years ago - it can be a real problem," said Paul Ducklin, head of technology at security firm Sophos.

Facebook's incessant notifications of friend requests, wall postings, private messages and, particularly, invitations to install plug-in applications like a graffiti wall are often cited as the most annoying bacn.

As a remedy, the social network recently announced it would soon allow users to opt to receive all Facebook notifications in a single daily digest email.

For other forms of bacn, Philip Routley, product marketing manager at security firm MessageLabs, advises people to filter emails based on the sender's address or keywords.

"My suggestion would be to setup a rule in your Outlook that filters bacn into a separate folder," he said.

"Therefore at the end of the day or at lunch time you can jump into that folder and read any emails that you want to."

For those who don't use Microsoft's Outlook email program, Google, on its official Gmail blog, has published instructions on how to filter bacn into special folders in its web-based email service.

Alternatively, Routley advises web users to create multiple accounts on free web-based email sites like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. They could then use a different address for every social network or mailing list they signed up to and all of the bacn generated by them would stay clear of their primary email account.

What really worries me is that if I don't do this stuff - hugging vampires and so on - my friends will see me as a bit of a wet blanket and will start to ignore me, especially deprioritizing coming to read my site. This, I suspect, is part of the psychology of bacn.

What it also does is highlight another - perhaps the greatest necessity of all - prioritizing one's time to best effect and to the benefit of the greatest number.