GoogleMonster

Over the last couple of weeks, I have come across a wide array of articles that are going on and on about how terrible the new GMail service is, and stands to be. It's amazing the wide range of public outcries that have been lobbied against this new service.

Generally, I tend to remain in the camp that if something offends, betrays, or otherwise compromises you in ways that you are not comfortable with, what danah boyd would qualify as "ickiness", stay away. That's right, don't use it. Don't respond to messages from it. Make up your own search.

It's a hard line to draw, I know, and it most likely offends more than it really should. I've had a discussion with someone one night about the SparkCard. Although I definitely understood the main points, I was not, much to the dismay of the attacker, "admit" that I was intentionally taking advantage of other people.

The fact of the matter is that most things have a cost associated with them, be it emotional, intellectual, or financial. The notion of free services are always colluded, in a large part, by the secret motives of the underlying organization. For example, many, many individuals have placed orders for products via TV infomercials. They have offered up credit card information, address information, and other "unmentionables", along with their 4.95 for shipping and handling of the otherwise "free" product. So how free was it then?

I tend to assume that the individuals that make it to consider a service long enough to part with this information, or control, as you might call it, understand enough to have commit this information, or deem it on par with the "free prize". When was the last time you read a User Agreement from start to finish?

Does it surprise anyone that marketing guru, Seth Godin, says this in his latest book, "Free Prize Inside!":

It's all marketing now. The organizations that win will be the ones that realize that all they must do is create things worth talking about.

Now if I can only figure out how to convert the SNS free prize into something valuable, I would have something to talk about indeed.