Too Much Free Time

Too Much Free Time

by Mike Masnick




Tired Is Wired

from the so-many-emails dept

Paul Boutin's latest piece for Slate is an amusing story about a friend of his who registered the domain name Tired.com back when both were working at Wired (remember all that Wired/Tired hype?). Like so many people who ended up owning a website, he had no idea what to do with it and put up a simple message: "Are you tired? Tell us why" and linked to an email address. It turns out, people were tired, and they had no problem telling why. For the past seven years, the guy who runs the site has received over 32,000 emails, coming in at a fairly constant rate during all that time. The site isn't advertised or talked about much (until now, I guess), but tired people keep showing up and answering the question. Boutin posts a couple of examples, and then notes that no one tries to disguise their identity. He believes that they simply don't think about the consequences at all, and are just answering the question.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

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  1. Jul 14th, 2004 @ 5:59am

    bare web site

    by aNonMooseCowherd

    The article isn't kidding about tired.com being a plain-looking web site. The entire page is 184 bytes and has one hyperlink, which is a mailto. A web version of the famed write-only memory.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. Jul 14th, 2004 @ 6:37am

    32K

    by xman

    32K messages in 7 years doesn't sound like a lot.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. Jul 14th, 2004 @ 9:54am

    Re: 32K

    It isn't. It's about 12.5 emails a day. I've probably gotten that many emails in the last seven years.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. Jul 14th, 2004 @ 10:01am

    Re: 32K

    Yeah, but you have people who want to email you. This is about that many people randomly finding a webpage that doesn't say much and deciding to email the person. That is impressive.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  5. Jun 23rd, 2006 @ 9:43pm

    00:42... That is the time to send

    00:42... That is the time to send some email to this guy.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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