Fun with E-Mail

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Some guy gets on my train this morning, sits down and--I'm not making this up--pulls out a battery-operated TV and turns the thing on, loud. He extends the rabbit ears and settles back with the TV in his lap and it's clear that this Nobel laureate thinks he's in his living room rather than on a commuter train where hardworking people are trying to nap. And he doesn't have the decency to use headphones--no, he's blasting the static-scarred Jerry [expletive deleted] Springer Show.

The fellow in front of me, clearly in touch with his feelings, says through clenched teeth, "Could you please turn that thing down? It's very annoying." To which Rabbit Ears replies, "Oh yeah? Well it annoys me when people yell into their cell phones..." As if that had anything to do with the situation. Suddenly everyone in the car pipes up, "That's annoying too! But turn the damn TV off." And I realized that there are a lot of angry folks out there who ought to connect and vent about bad manners. What my trainmates needed was an e-mail list.

You probably know that Internet mailing lists tend to be free discussion groups, focused on particular issues. There are more than 200,000 of them on the Net with some 15 million subscribers discussing everything from global warming to nose hair. Setting up a public mailing list used to be a hassle unless you had access to industrial-strength mailing programs used at universities that allow folks to do things such as automatically subscribe to and unsubscribe from lists. Since e-mail has grown so popular, though, a number of companies are helping people set up and manage mailing lists, for a fee of about $10 a month. Lsoft.com and Sparklist.com are examples of fee-based services--the kind of thing you might need for fast, reliable service.

But here's good news for the rest of us: San Francisco-based Topica.com has just launched a snappy site and is vowing to be the "Yahoo of e-mail lists," according to company founder Ariel Poler. You can search the site by keyword or topic, read blurbs about each one and subscribe to any of 30,000 lists.

Topica hopes to make money mainly through targeted ads. Anyone searching for a list about basenjis, say, might see a dog-food ad. At some point, list "owners" may be given the option of allowing short, targeted text ads to be appended to messages sent to subscribers--in exchange for a percentage of the ad revenue. That sounds tasty.

So I figured I'd set up a list, which was easy enough to do: the interface is clear and well-explained and just about perfect. I chose to make my list unmoderated, meaning anything anyone sends goes out to the full list, rather than through a moderator. I also made it open--you can subscribe without my permission. And I named it "Trainshouters." It's a forum to discuss the bad ways people use perfectly good technology. Feel free to join.

I understand that e-mail from ranting strangers isn't for everyone. So here's another way to have more fun with e-mail, one to one. Hasbro Interactive's Em@il Games are $15 programs that attach interactive game boards to most e-mail programs so people can play Scrabble, chess, Battleship and other amusements. Demo versions can be sampled at www.emailgames.com Now if only there were a way to play on the train.

For more fun with e-mail, visit our Web site at timedigital.com Questions for Quittner? E-mail him at jquit@well.com