The document discusses how aggregators on the internet can lead to "SpamBack" if they are not properly programmed. It describes how a feedback loop could be created by posting content from one service to another and back again, without recognizing that the content has already been seen. To prevent this, the document suggests that aggregators check for a unique content ID and drop any content that has already been associated with that ID. As more services aggregate content, addressing this issue of SpamBack will become more important to avoid overloading systems on the internet.

1. How to Break the Internet Paul Johnston Entrepreneur, Innovator, Businessman Addicted to Twitter (when it's up!) http://twitter.com/pjnet http://friendfeed.com/padajo http://padajo.wordpress.com

2. How to Break the Internet In The Beginning...

3. How to Break the Internet It was all very simple First came email The internet came into being off the back of email Then some other stuff like Usenet and Gopher Then came HTML and the Mosaic browser The interwebnet was truly born

4. How to Break the Internet The Egyptians are coming!

5. How to Break the Internet Companies started creating brochureware Lots of content started to be added to the fledgling interwebnet It all got a bit difficult to navigate Companies started providing organisation and searching Yahoo! Won the day

6. How to Break the Internet Wandering in the Wilderness

7. How to Break the Internet Proper Search Engines started to come along Google happened! Everyone loved Google Google ads started allowing people to easily make money

8. How to Break the Internet Peer to peer technologies emerged Really big files started to move Copyright started to be infringed Media companies started seeing revenue problems

9. How to Break the Internet The Promised Land...? Web 2.0

10. How to Break the Internet Blogs, wikis, RSS, Video, all started to happen UGC happened The interwebnet felt like it was changing and becoming more something for the community that used it Someone thought that we should call all this stuff something different

11. How to Break the Internet So someone came up with... Web 2.0 And we had a proliferation of Web 2.0 Websites and Social Networks Then we got things like Twitter And then Friendfeed came along

12. How to Break the Internet Uh Oh

13. How to Break the Internet I love Twitter ... and blogs ... and friendfeed And I love content aggregators

14. How to Break the Internet The Problem with Aggregators

15. How to Break the Internet Friendfeed is the most interesting tool of the moment (for me) It's an aggregator of all your stuff on the internet Commenting on any web-based content Aggregators cannot easily distinguish between 2 versions of the same content

16. How to Break the Internet RSS is the problem... or is it?

17. How to Break the Internet So here's the problem Setup an account on twitter (e.g. extremefeedback) Then go and setup a friendfeed account (the same) Tell friendfeed you've got a twitter account and it starts to consume it Then use twitterfeed to consume the friendfeed feed and post it to twitter You have the perfect feedback loop

18. How to Break the Internet Internet Feedback Loops: SpamBack

19. How to Break the Internet One piece of content Propagation across the internet Re-post back to the original place It's not new It will become a problem We're going to get more and more SpamBack

20. How to Break the Internet Is there a way out of this?

21. How to Break the Internet Yes But we need to change how we consume content Especially RSS The key is the unique content ID As well as passing around the content we need to pass around an ID

22. How to Break the Internet Pass around an ID alongside the content System that consumes will need to check that it hasn't already seen that ID If it has, it drops the content It's not foolproof, but it's a starting point The more aggregators there are, the more this idea of SpamBack will need to be taken into account

23. How to Break the Internet ” Dude! You'll break the internet!”

24. How to Break the Internet We have to be more careful about how we program consumption of RSS and other content feeds to avoid SpamBack Responsibility lies with both the aggregator and the feed creator As a friend of mine said when I was going to test this theory: ” Dude! You'll break the internet!”

25. How to Break the Internet Paul Johnston Entrepreneur, Innovator, Businessman Addicted to Twitter (when it's up!) http://twitter.com/pjnet http://friendfeed.com/padajo http://padajo.wordpress.com