On Message with Ben Gross

Man accused of using LinkedIn to steal clients: The Register covers a lawsuit regarding a former employee of a recruitment firm who allegedly used his LinkedIn account to essentially export his contacts from the firm so he could use them to start a new competing firm. This is interesting for several reasons particularly with regard [...]

Coding Horror: Please Give Us Your Email Password: Jeff Atwood has a nice point outlining the unfortunately still too common practice of web services that request a user’s login and password from the major web services (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) in order to extract address book information. Not only is this an obviously bad idea, [...]

Coding Horror: Designing For Evil: Jeff Atwood discusses some of the problems Craigslist has with spammers, some of the automated tools people can buy to spam Craiglist and some of the protections Craiglist has put in place to defended its community from spammers. Many of the problems and solutions apply to other community messaging systems.
Email [...]

Choosing the right email listserv: David Strom’s Web Informant provides a brief overview of free and inexpensive mailing list management tools suitable for individuals, groups, and small businesses. These services are often great improvements over attempting to manage a list directly from an email client. Strom is using Listserv in the generic sense as he [...]

New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends: The Wall Street Journal has a piece on services and social network tools that can be used and abused to discover and extract information about individuals that would often be difficult to obtain otherwise.
The Dark Side of Social Networking: Questions for Brant Walker: The Voice [...]

mail-trends: Mihai Parparita’s tool to let you analyze and visualize your own Google-based email collection. The software is still in its early stages and requires a Python installation and a Google Apps or Gmail account. Mail-trends is open source under the BSD license. Hopefully, Mihai will update the package to support other IMAP servers in [...]

Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding: In the Guardian Cory writes covers a set of simple tips for keeping messages to your inbox to a minimum. The five tips are: Sort your inbox by subject, color-code messages from known senders, kill people who make you crazy, half-resign from mailing lists, and keep a [...]

Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami: Randall Stross at the New York Times writes a refreshingly entertaining piece on the often overdone topic of email overload. He provides nice comparisons the habits of Thomas Edison and H. L. Mencken for responding to the overload of communication in previous times.
Not Using Tweetscan to Manage Your Brand? [...]

Understanding CardSpace | : As part of his Perspectives series, Jon Udell interviews Vittorio Bertocci, the author of Understanding Windows CardSpace. The interview is interesting and covers a number of current identity management topics. In addition to the audio of the interview, a full transcript is available. The inline audio player requires a Microsoft Silverlight [...]

The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere: ReadWriteWeb has a nice summary of a variety of tools, that aggregate many of the new messaging services such as Twitter along with messaging and updates from social network services such as Facebook and new collaborative new services such as Digg.
Careful What You Text or Tweet: EmailTide covers the [...]