Hoofbeats in the Distance

Everything starts small. There is a trickle before the deluge, a distant thunder before the braying calamity of a stampede. It began for me today, October 10, 2007. The drive to record the event propelled me into the blogosphere, and here I am. So, what was it?

SPAM

Yes, spam. Old news? Not exactly. SMS spam on my cell phone. I always speculated that this would happen to those people with their glitzy gadgety phones that are more computer than phone. I never suspected that it would happen on my decrepit, five year old LG that struggles to be a phone on good days. The best thing about it is that I just paid 10 cents for this wonderful message:


FRM:Pasquale
SUBJ:OTW
MSG:Get *ringtones and movie downloads for your cell goto: (www.hotadultsms .info)
1010100001

The really funny thing about this is that I have been discussing communication methods and communication software virtually all day with David Ascher and others surrounding the “MailCo” Thunderbird transition at Mozilla. This little cell phone incident just confirmed my belief that there is quite a bit more innovation possible (and needed) in this problem space, and that there still some very old problems that need to be solved well.