I’d recently discovered a mailbox that I had left unattended for several years.  It had no anti-spam tool monitoring it, so it was mostly filled with really obvious spam messages and phishing attempts – email scams where people try to fool you into putting in your financial information into a site that looks like a legitimate banking site.

I found this message particularly amusing and thought I would share:

The email wants me to believe that Bank of America is giving me $30,000 in a lottery I never signed up for, never identifies me by name, and wants me to become a Western Union “Active Member.” (The message was sent in 2007, otherwise the Bank of the America reference would clearly be even less believable.)  All I have to do is send $400 to a Western Union in Phoenix, Arizona.  Phoenix isn’t even the corporate headquarters for Western Union.  Couldn’t they have thought of something more clever than that?  It seems pretty lazy.  It made me wonder how many people might have actually fallen for it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently published a study showing that the public estimates of losses due to phishing may be over-exaggerated by as much as a factor of 50.  In fact, most phishers may ultimately become victims themselves.  In the study, the researchers concluded that:

One explanation of the thriving trade in phishing-related services … is that phishers with more experience prey upon those with less. That is, those who have tried phishing and found it unprofitable or marginally profitable find it better to sell services to those who haven’t reached that conclusion yet.

So the big fish eat the little fish, just like in the sea.  Nice.

UPDATE:

I just took a peek at the Western Union website.  Maybe this type of scam is more prevalent than I thought.  Front and center on their online transfers page is a very clear and stern warning:

Protect Yourself from Fraud Don’t Send Money

• To someone who you don’t know
• To claim lottery or prize winnings
• Based on a promise to receive a large amount of money
• Because you were "guaranteed" a credit card or loan
• In response to an Internet or phone offer that you aren’t sure is honest

It’s really surprising that people actually need to be warned that they shouldn’t send money to claim a lottery or prize winnings.

[Microsoft Phishing Study c/o InformationWeek]

But even though adoption has been slow, more and more applications are gradually getting Gears treatments.

Today Google announced that Gmail can now be taken offline with Google Gears, meaning that you can now read and reply to your Gmail messages while you’re disconnected from the interweb, and have all of the email synchronize when you’re back online again.  There are still some bits of functionality that aren’t available in an offline mode – like the calendar, for example – but it’s a great start and about time.

Google Reader has offered offline support through Gears for some time now, and so has Google Docs.  Wordpress, although not an application developed by Google, has featured gears support for some time now.

It’s exciting to see so many powerful and rich applications available for offline use with Gears.  This could be one of those little things that Microsoft hears about and gets them a little bit nervous about the long-term future.  It’s probably far too early to make predictions about how much further web applications will go in replacing traditional desktop applications – and certainly there will always be some applications that will probably never be practical as web applications, like Adobe Photoshop for example.  But traditional “knowledge worker” applications – office productivity applications – seem like prime targets to be replaced by rich web applications.  Reliable and usable offline versions will likely accelerate the pace of innovation in these types of applications, as having an offline version will likely speed up end user adoption.  In other words, I think we’re hitting an inflection point where Google may consider a heavier investment in engineering and development of these tools.  Plus, Microsoft is planning a full web interface of their Office suite with the Office 14 release.  This could be the start of a new software war: the offline office suite war.

But I could be wrong.  As I said, I overestimated how quickly Gears would be adopted in the first place.  So we’ll see, I suppose.  My money is on Google for now, though.

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

This seems like the right way to go to make people comfortable about using the freely use the system to transfer ideas that may contain pieces of intellectual property.

Kudos to Twitter for the straightforward rules over content copyright.

I happened across a great blog post from Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of BDG – the folks behind The Social Collective.  In response to a post about Robert Scoble losing his Facebook account because it was mistaken for a spam account, Chris wrote:

If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!

For your reading ease, here’s the part of Google’s TOS in particular that Chris was referencing:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

(Yes, Google’s TOS agreement does indeed include a misspelling of the word license.)

Chris goes on to point out that this is because Google intends to parse the content and make it available to advertisers so that they’ll know what advertisements to display to you.  The exact section of Google’s TOS doesn’t indicate that you lose any rights over the content that you enter.  You still retain a irrevocable license over it.  But it is clear that Google claims a right to reuse it as they need, and to transfer that right to anyone else.

This brings up an interesting scenario, although probably somewhat unlikely.  Imagine if you posted some great ideas about a product you were building on Google Docs, and you had no intention of disclosing this information with any of your competitors because it was so fantastic.  What would happen if Google either purposefully or accidentally stole that very idea and started building a competing site?  This gets into a legal area that I’m totally unfamiliar with, but would love to find an IP lawyer who might be able to work out the possibilities.  It would seem, though, that Google could make claim that the work you posted was prior art, making any claim to a patent you might have (or be in the process of filing) void and null.

I’m no fan of software patents, though, but I am curious what might happen.

Oh, and remember that Google promised if they do use your ideas, you’ll at least get a shout-out on their blog.

In case that was way too complicated for you to understand, here’s my web 2.0 business plan in three easy phases:

This was pretty much the plan for everyone from Digg to FriendFeed, Twitter to Facebook.  And despite the obvious flaw of not really having a phase two, these companies still exist and are still fully operational.  Granted, several web 2.0 companies have entered the deadpool (Pownce, for example), but a lot of the ones you might have thought would be dead and out of money by now are still up and running, which is pretty darned amazing considering that they lack any publicly known business plans.

Twitter is already trying to figure out exactly what their business plan is, and in fact they’ve recently hired someone to help them figure out how they’ll make money – Twitter recently hired Kevin Thau who hails from past ventures Buzzwire and Openwave.  It’s hard to imagine what Twitter might do even just to cover what are likely to be increasingly expensive costs to run and maintain their infrastructure.

But that doesn’t explain one small, minor detail that I still can’t figure out: how is it that these companies got any VC funding without presenting any real business plans?  And furthermore, why is it that companies like Yammer, Present.ly and even IBM are taking concepts directly from Twitter and already making real money on them before Twitter ever even turns over a single dime?  I’m not criticizing these companies for creating similar functional offerings – to the contrary, the fact that they seem to have a good business a plan speaks highly of their possible futures.

Upon reflection, I think it’s probably wrong of me to include Facebook in the list of web 2.0 startups that don’t really have a solid business plan.  I do believe they had always intended to advertise to their users, and that they could do this more effectively by selling ad space on profiles that matched demographics that their marketers are after.  I had also written last month that I do believe they have enough momentum going to find a steady revenue stream before going under.

But that doesn’t explain what Twitter, Digg or FriendFeed or similar services will do if the costs of running their infrastructure outpace their funding.  They’re all great tools to share and discover content (and generate endless memes), but if push came to shove I think I could probably give up most of them and rely on Facebook to provide the same or similar functionality.

That’s enough for now.  I’d better get back to enjoying my favorite web 2.0 sites while they last.

MySpace is now following Facebook’s example, and has blocked access from Power.com for almost the exact same reasons.

Power.com failed to do a few key things that would’ve saved themselves from this embarrassing situation, both technical and non-technical:

• First, Power.com really should’ve engaged with the social networking sites they wanted to support as business partners first, rather than trying to go the renegade route and writing their own interfaces.
• Assuming that worked, they should’ve worked with those sites to come up with solutions for single sign-on rather than storing user credentials in their own database – storing the user credentials puts undue responsibility on Power.com to keep additional sensitive data secured.
• If the partnering approach didn’t work, and companies like Facebook ignored Power.com’s requests, Power.com could’ve used the opportunity as a way to promote the idea of the "openness of social networks" and pointed out how companies want to monopolize your social data, etc.  Instead they’re now going to need to fight the possible misconception that they are just a rogue site that shouldn’t be trusted with user credentials.

As someone that uses a lot of emerging social networking sites, I would love to have something that gives me a single dashboard to all of them.  So I would like to see the idea of Power.com succeed.  But having them be an aggregator means they must be trusted to perform that function securely.

Getting shutdown (now or soon):

• Google Video
• Google Catalogs Search
• Dodgeball
• Jaiku (may live on w/volunteers)
• Google Mashup Editor

Rumored to be shut down soon:

• Grand Central
• Knol
• Google Base
• Google Notebook

I’d add: Google Sites to that list, too.  But CNET didn’t call it yet.

I’ve got to say: I’m not surprised to see any of these get the ax.  Google Video was replaced by YouTube.  Google Catalog Search turned useless as most companies now offer their catalogs online, and besides there’s Google Book Search still.  Dodgeball — I’d never even heard of it, unfortunately.  Jaiku was similar to Pownce (which is now gone), Twitter, FriendFeed, and many others, but not quite as powerful.  And Google Mashup Editor… Well… Mashups are just a bad idea.  I think it’s time we finally just all admit that real application integration shouldn’t happen on the glass.  It should happen behind the scenes through SOA or even REST.

As for the others: Grand Central: never heard of it.  Knol: why compete with Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers?  And Google Base: I think Craigslist works better.

It’s sad to see these projects go, since it’s a sign of the economic times.

[More details at CNET News]

The thing that came to mind was pretty short and simple, and that is:  Apple will still be the same company it is today without Steve Jobs, perhaps for as long as a decade.  Despite investors’ fears that Apple will not succeed without Steve Jobs, I believe Apple will still bring fantastic products to the consumer market and continue to innovate for a long time to come.  Why am I so optimistic about this?  Well, despite the fact that I am a notorious optimist, the reason is fairly straightforward.  Jobs’ significant influence on Apple means he has built a company culture that will survive past his time as CEO.  As wise and inspiring of a leader as Jobs’ might be, he is just one person.  Apple is a company of thousands of people, all of whom own some responsibility for the success of the company.

It’s true that Jobs helped re-focus and re-vitalize Apple after they strayed from the core principles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it was his influence and direction that helped develop the culture that exists at Apple today.  And, perhaps arguably, it wasn’t until recent years that Apple has really perfected their company culture of well thought out, high-quality product designs that have propelled all of their recent ventures, such as the iPhone and iTouch, to such brilliant successes.

There is little question that having strong and outspoken leaders within an organization is one of the single most important factors for success.  But great leaders build a culture of success, and dismantling a dynamic and healthy company culture will likely take just as long as it took to build it up.  Will the folks at Apple who are equally as influential in creating the environment at Apple that exists today flee the company just because Jobs is stepping down for a short period?  It’s unlikely.  Even if Jobs’ departure is permanent, the best and brightest at Apple will likely stick around to keep doing what they have already been doing for the last 5-10 years.  Those most influential people in the company are likely to be fans of their workplace, and abandoning ship is not an option for them.

Any of us who have worked for great company environments (or even bad ones) know how hard it is to shift the working environment in either direction.  Changes in company culture don’t happen overnight, although an organization can eventually collapse when enough of the key people leave at the same time.  But, at least for the time being, it would appear that Apple is in no risk of that happening.  For that reason, Apple will likely remain successful and innovative.

Amongst them:  it costs money to transfer existing purchases to DRM-free tracks, you can’t choose to upgrade just a part of your current iTunes collection – it’s all or nothing.  But perhaps the most distressing part of the DRM-free iTunes tracks still contain personal information about yourself, namely the email address that you use with iTunes.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.  I still believe that Apple’s move was largely one of fashion: DRM is un-cool, and Apple is all about selling hip consumer products.  I also believe that Apple was trying to improve the experience for users, which seems to be a part of their core beliefs as a company.  But I’m not sure what Apple’s aim is by including the email address in their iTunes tracks.  This appears to be a left-over piece of tracking information that has been noticed since 2007.  I suspect that the goal of including the email address in the iTunes track is to identify if you’re a repeat broad-sharing offender: someone who buys tracks from iTunes and then shares them frequently with others.  But what happens if your laptop gets stolen, or if someone you know and share files with gets their data taken from them?  I wonder how Apple might approach situations like that.

In a way, it seems like Apple has potentially gone further in transferring the responsibility of preventing file sharing from themselves to the consumer.  I’m not sure how that will play out with consumers if that turns out to be accurate.

[More iTunes details at CNET News]

VIZIO, America’s TV and Consumer Electronics Company, announced today the unveiling of its "Connected HDTV" Platform, which enhances the HDTV viewing experience by bringing personalized entertainment, information and social networking content into the viewer’s living room. With unprecedented choice and control of web-based and local content from a wide range of popular content providers and services, including on-demand movies and music, news, weather, sports, gaming and social networking services, this platform will be integrated as a key feature into VIZIO televisions shipping to retailers nationwide this Fall 2009 in time for the busy holiday season.

So I guess even if my next television is a Vizio (which I have been very happy with for the last two years), I’ll still get all the same benefits of having Internet connectivity.  It’s good to see all of the major television manufacturers moving towards the same trend.  Is it just a matter of time, though, before we see things like a television with a built in gaming platform as well?

One thing that’s not clear from all the press releases is the details around what browser (if any) will be built into the televisions, and how well they’ll support RIA (rich Internet applications).  I’m sure details will be forthcoming for developers, though.