…or as French philosopher Virilio puts it:

Every time a new technology has been invented, a new energy harnessed, a new product made, one also invents a new negativity, a new accident.
You can’t invent the car without inventing the crash.
Recently Stan pointed out that this is precisely the case with what every internet innovation has to deal with: email came with spam, blogs brought splogs, online banking enabled the phishing market to emerge and Google’s pagerank technology is subject to Google bombing.
We don’t seem to get the good stuff for free and ironically that’s because most of the time we’re not willing to pay for it - if every email would cost you a buck, we wouldn’t have the spam problem anymore.
But since we want it for ‘free’, we have to pay for it in other ways and bite the bullet of spam, splogs, phishing, malware and confusable search engines.
What does that mean for new web companies/services and products? If classical search engines become unreliable because of Google bombing, will social search help? Or will it just generate new downsides?
The major problem of most social networking applications has been summarized in this nice article at wired.com:
When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone peers in the beer.
This is closely related to my post about the ‘Exclusionary Principle’. Sometimes it isn’t so much about having the right people at your party, but rather to avoid the guests who contaminate the beverages. When I am throwing a party, I avoid to invite everyone, i.e.  I don’t print lots of posters or flyers. Instead, I invite my friends who again invite their friends who I usually get along with very well. It’s a matter of trust.
Now this party situation is pretty straightforward and manageable compared to the sociophysics of the online world, where each of us is even more in need of reliable sources - which we basically have: I trust my father on medical issues, I trust my brother on hardware stuff, I trust my friend Kristian on cool new bands, I trust Niko on telling me which pages to avoid and I trust all of them to trust the right people, too. Wouldn’t it be great to have all their knowledge with me while I’m online?
To this end we are going to establish a new kind of web service, based on the Outfoxed Firefox Extension - by simply applying a highly efficient natural principle of offline life to the online world.

technorati tags: web2.0 goodstuff badstuff

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