Being spammed by your friends

One of the most recent big words in Internet advertising is "viral marketing", the idea being to use people as a tool to advertise to their friends. But is your inbox overflowing with this type of promotion yet?

Viral marketing was first coined in reference to the tag-line ads that would appear at the end of messages from the users of free e-mail services, as in "Do You Yahoo?" It's a clever and essentially benign idea, one that is generally credited for much of the early explosive growth of Hotmail. So now, of course, all the free e-mail services and lots of other e-businesses do the same thing. But AllAdvantage.com is taking it one dubious step further.

Your friends send you things they think would be of interest to you, often they aren't and are a nuisance to your time online and your inbox. These forwards and type of emails are often referred to at "tat".

The problem comes with viral marketing if companies are willing to pay people to send you emails and get you signed up for things This is when it becomes spam.

AllAdvantage.com offered to pay its members to surf the Web, it also paid when friends were surfing. This tiered commission structure means people are keen to tell anyone they can about these schemes to make more money. The end product; lots of people hear about the product, but its knocks a lot of people noses out of joint and soon pollutes inboxes.

Companies are willing to spend huge amounts of money to advertise their products so the money available to fund these schemes is there and people start spamming their friends and everyone they know, to make a bit of money. It means you can start receiving unsolicted approaches from your friends, something which isn't going to trigger any spam filter and is unlikely that you will delete it immediately without reading it first.