Growing Pains: Mashups for Phising and Spamming

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One thing that was clear from Mashup Camp in Dublin was that Mashups are still not mainstream, even if they are creeping closer and closer. John Herren made an interesting comment in his Introduction to Mashups presentation at the Camp, and that was that we will know that Mashups are about to be really big when the spammers and phishers start to use them. So far the spammers are concentrating on email, wikis and blog comments, but maybe the next step is Mashups. I am not sure how that would look, but I can imagine that the ability to combine services quickly would fit phishers quite well, especially if the internet users in general are not aware of those possibilities.

It will be interesting to see how this will look like and how it will impact the Mashup tool vendors and Mashups in general. Spamming and scamming is part of growing up for all internet technologies (arguably for all communication related technologies) so let’s see how Mashups will handle the growing pains.