The power of laughing at oneself... and musings on spam
And now, I know how spam began. My fingers must've slipped, and I never needed AutoCorrect more than at this moment:
Oh, and did I mention that I cross-posted it to Facebook using HootSuite?
As the Twitter and Facebook jokes rolled across the interwebz, I had two separate thoughts.
- Laughing at oneself is a powerful gift.
- This must be how spam got started.
I'm imagining that somewhere, back in the early 90s, someone sent an email with a similar typo in it and was flooded with responses. And in that same somewhere, one guy said, "Hey... if you add an unrelated yet compelling keyword to a correspondence, people click on it. I bet I can get really unethical people to pay me to do this."
Actually, it turns out, I'm half right. Wikipedia documents the first instance of commercial spam in 1994 by a pair of lawyers (I'm shocked) using a Usenet posting to advertise their immigration law services. If Britney Spears or Justin Bieber had been around at that time, I'm sure their names would have appeared prominently in the entry.
That being said, I'm happy to see that my friends also have a sense of humor:
Laughter - better than spam.