You are already feeling irritable as you begin the process of wading
through the hundred or so spam messages that have accumulated over
the weekend, and it doesn't help that your email client is set to pick up new
messages automatically every five minutes and that most of the new stuff is just
more spam. So when your AIM client pops up on the screen
and happily announces that a new message has arrived, and that message turns out
to be an unsolicited advertisement as well, you just blow a fuse and wander
off in search of coffee and Tylenol...
Sad but true, spim ( Instant Message Spam) is on the rise and has all the
earmarkings of inevitability. The world's marketing geniuses
have yet to see a channel they didn't love and mercilessly exploit.
Spam-style messages delivered over the instant messaging networks may well be
their next target. Although the volume of spim is still fairly low, 500
million messages in 2003 according to Ferris Research, it has almost doubled
since 2002. That exponential rate of growth suggests that spim
will reach the threshold of annoyance sometime very soon and become a major
problem for users in the near future. Of course spim has a long way to go to
catch up with spam. Ferris Research reports that last year
one anti-spam service provider, Brightmail, trapped 800 billion spam messages
in 2003. The term "Spim" seems a likely candidate for widespread
use. Near as I can tell it was first used in a Jabber discussion group1.
It was recently picked up by Information Week, a launch pad for upwardly
mobile memes.
Spim Control
Ironically, so far most spim messages are sales pitches
for software that will prevent spim. No doubt the spimmers will soon branch out
into the more common Paris Hilton videos and organic viagra
sales. Anything that is currently clogging the spam filters is a likely
candidate for spim in the near future. Officials at AOL and MSN, two
important IM providers both acknowledge that they've observed a recent increase
in spim. They are both taking some measures to deal with spim; MSN
Messenger doesn't allow messages from people not on your buddy list, and AOL
9.0 includes a feature called IMCatcher, that quarantines messages from users
you don't know. These measures are marginally effective, but won't serve
to stop the rise of spim as marketers begin to adopt the same process of
harvesting IM addresses from websites and public chat rooms. IM users
wishing to avoid spim are advised to only release their screen names to those
they know and not to post them on public websites.
The one factor effectively serving to control the growth of spim at this time
is the fragmented nature of the Instant Messaging networks. As long as
AOL users can't talk directly to MSN or Yahoo IM users marketers are forced to
work harder for their audiences. Unfortunately, at least in this narrow
perspective, talks are ongoing between the IM providers about increasing the
interoperability of their networks. This convergence would dramatically
increase the rewards for spimmers and likely hasten its increase in
volume.
Spim is also becoming visible in the wireless market where, according to Zachary
Rodgers of InstantMessagingPlanet.com2,
"The wireless advertising industry's Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)
has released a six-point industry code of conduct for North American wireless
marketing campaigns, hoping to stop a spam epidemic before it
starts." The MMA's Privacy Policy Advisory Committee includes such
heavy marketers as Procter & Gamble, The Weather Channel and Verisign3,
none of whom can be expected to be overly sympathetic to beleaguered users.
Their guidelines appear to give a favorable nod to spammers who collect detailed
demographic information for their marketing campaigns and solicit "targeted
audiences" only, on the presumption that these unsolicited messages are
therefore less annoying to consumers.
Prepare for the flood...
===================&===================
1 Jabber discussion on Spim: http://www.jabber.org/wiki/index.php/spim
2 InstantMessagingPlanet.com covers the IM
beat: http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/
3 Mobile Marketing Association is the belly of the
beast: http://www.mmaglobal.com/
Notes & Errata
Master_Villain says re SPIM: You forgot to talk about ICQ and the porn spam that did/does the rounds on it. Had the added effect of being able to send spam before people had started using the number, but ICQ had the functionality needed to stop it built in from the get-go