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My most popular posting

I don’t know why, but my post on yahoo mail problems is my most popular post thus far. I suspect it got picked up in google, or some other search engine, and is now serving as a place for folks to gripe about the free Yahoo! mail service. (Incidentally, I’m the second “Dan Moore” in google now! Meri has some interesting things to say about this intersection between the internet and real life.) This is interesting (and a bit amusing) to me for several reasons:

For one, there’s no helpful content on that posting for these folks problems. In fact, I don’t even use the free service from Yahoo (I pay extra for storage). And the posting concerns the short term problems a client of mine had with the new Yahoo mail interface, and how outsourcing exposes you to those types of risks. The comments are not germane to the posting.

Or should I say that the posting is not germane to the comments? As is ever the case on internet forums, this posting has been hijacked by people who want to complain and share possible fixes to a very real problem–they can’t get to their email (I’m cranky when I can’t to my email, after all). I don’t begrudge them the use of my site; this just reinforces what Clay Shirky wrote about social software–people will twist software until it does what they need it to do, and fighting that is a lost cause (and has been for 20 years).

And that’s not just true for software, but for technology in general. After all, I doubt anyone working on radar thought it would someday be used for re-heating leftovers, and I’m sure that Daguerre (the inventor of photography) would be shocked at some of the pictures I’ve taken at house parties.