Back to Tech Blog homepageNew friend notifications on Facebook, weekly events newsletters, Twitter updates; the list goes on. As web-based services have come to permeate our lives, so too have automated email updates come to permeate our inboxes.
Such messages present a dilemma. They resemble spam in that we are bombarded with them daily. Subscribe to too many web services and you may soon find that such updates are clogging your inbox, just like spam. They are unlike spam, however, in that you actually want to read them, at some point - just not right now. Computer geeks now have a term for this kind of troublesome "non-spam spam": Bacn. As in, bacn is better than spam, but still clogs your inbox.
The term has been picked up by hundreds of blogs since it was mentioned at a conference on Sunday. Having now decided on a sufficiently ironic buzzword for the bacn problem, one hopes that the tech community will set about finding a solution.
Below, a video documenting the birth of the internet’s latest buzzword, courtesy of lifeblogger iJustine.
David Gelles, Joseph Menn, Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in the FT's San Francisco bureau upload their views - plus tech insights from writers in New York, London and Tokyo
Richard Waters
Chris Nuttall
David Gelles
Maija Palmer
Joseph Menn
Robin Kwong
Tim Bradshaw
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