Do You Have Bacn In Your Email Inbox?
by
on August 22, 2007,
Sure, you have heard of spam, but have you heard of bacn? Not what you eat for breakfast, but what you find in your email inbox that is a legitimate email, but not really worth viewing.
When you get those messages from communities you have joined that simply notify you of updates or a new friend, that is bacn.
MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and many other web 2.0 services have contributed to this growing issue. But, if it is not really spam, and it's not bogus, is bacn really a problem?
To be honest, I had not heard of bacn, until yesterday when I came across a post on Lifehacker. I must not be too far behind the times on this though, as it is mentioned that the term was born earlier this week. This (somewhat official) definition is provided there:
“Email you receive that isn't spam… And isn't personal mail. It's the middle class of email. It's notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It's the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”
No time has been wasted in spreading the word about bacn, with an official blog already having been formed. There are only a few posts so far, but they do state that “Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes… it?s become a recognized issue that people are now finally taking actions to fix.”
Even BuzzFeed has now detected Bacn as the latest buzz, and is providing useful links that relate to “the new email food group.” If that is not enough, check out Technorati, which already has over 300 blog posts about bacn, and Google Blog Search, which turns up with nearly 900 relevant blog posts.
iJustine recently attended a PodCamp event in Pittsburgh, where the term was explained and discussed. “We want to read them, we want to follow those who just added us, but don?t quite have the time to do it right this second,” she stated in her post, which also contains a video clip of the discussion.
Another video blogger, Bill Cammack, has gone a step further by providing some expansion on possible types of bacn. To add some comic spin to an already funny name, he stated via Twitter that “FakinBacn” is spam disguised as bacn. Even better, his name for spam from Digg is KvnBacn! 
Is bacn really an epidemic that needs a solution though? I mean, there are ways of preventing these emails or redirecting them.
I have signed up for numerous services on the internet myself, that send constant email messages. It is what I expect, because as a writer of a web 2.0 blog, I review a lot of services. The web 2.0 world is one that is constantly being updated and modified, and with email still being the most universal way to communicate with others online, most services find this the best way to stay in contact with users.
I will admit that bacn can add up in your inbox, but several services offer you the option to opt out of receiving emails. It is usually as simple as visiting your preferences or account settings page.
Another way, my preferred method, is to set up a filter that catches those emails and channels them into a separate folder, keeping your inbox clutter-free (see the screenshot of my Pownce filter in Gmail above). This way, you can still view the emails, if necessary. With many free email services providing gigabytes of space now, instead of megabytes, most users should have enough room to keep everything without the need to constantly clear out your filters.
This is often the method used to catch spam, but spam can be much harder to detect, as it often is sent from several different email addresses. Bacn, on the other hand, is easy to anticipate, because you must voluntarily sign up for a social network or web service before you receive these types of emails.
All that I can say about bacn is that you get what you ask for, and when you sign up for online services, you are basically asking for them to keep you up-to-date when you enter your email address.
If it weren't for bacn, I would probably forget about half of the services that I sign up for, simply because there are so many. Keeping these emails in my inbox, but separate, is like a kind of reminder that notifies me that its time to take a look and see what is new.
What is your stand on the bacn issue? Is it a problem, or is it just a side effect of the web 2.0 universe?
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Michael Fidler 
Michael, thank you for the wonderful post. Honestly, I don’t see any problem in bacn because I would have visited quite a number of social networks much less often if not for various notifications (though for Pownce I have disabled almost all the notifications because it seems to be a leader in notifying me about every single move my friends make). Besides, there are alternatives - for certain notifications I choose RSS feeds instead of emails. That I know for sure I will only check when I definitely have time to. And they don’t clutter my inbox, too.
Much like Svetlana, I think the impact of Bacn is, or certainly can be, negligible. It is however definitely a distinct type of activity data that needs recognition to improve user experience.
Many (normal?) users like to get such alerts by email, partly because they don’t know any other way and it’s a channel which suits them (i.e. they can look through activity at the same time as their email, and without visiting many different sites). I don’t necessarily see increased Bacn supplies to be an issue if you have the wherewith-all to manage it. Sure the simple way is with mail rules (a dedicated address also helps) but taking it a step further, many services do allow you to specify what ‘actions’ result in Bacn getting sent to you by email, and for those that offer feeds you can turn off all Bacn emails and use an aggregator. These are in a good position to better handle and present this kind of data than they do currently though.
Some services also expose notifications through their APIs, so with Facebook or Twitter for example you can use an application that simply puts up an unobtrusive alert on your screen (preferably auto-dismissing if you’re at your screen), this results in more temporal relevancy for items important to you—without any action on your part, and one less item in your mailbox.
Some interesting (disparate) solutions in this area are Particls and from the sound of things, Fuser.
Personally I use a combination of all these methods (and a hacked together app of my own for displaying Growl alerts) and it’s really manageable, more so at least than keeping up with the blogs I’m subscribed to! If I was getting alerts for every network though I’d go mad, but we do have to be selective and this I think will be one of the defining features of the next iteration of connected applications.