The other day I gave you my rather dire prediction for 2009, that we’re all going to be over run by shadowy Facebook profiles and bad men who pose as teenage girls to see your profile (OK, I left that part out) but that got me drinking and when I thought about it more, it occurred to me that what I’m really talking about isn’t very different than how I make some of my online money already.

Farming.

That’s where the real money is. OK, in my case it’s mining asteroids in low security sectors of space with a small fleet of abnormally well armored battle ships hanging over a series of harvesters but the basic concept is the same, in EVE we harvest asteroids for profit and in turn trade those resources to users for money, power or camera lens (cough). In Word of Warcraft, it’s about farming for armor or world of warcraft game time and on Facebook if you can get access to other peoples profiles, data mining is where the future is.

I spoke with an online friend in Senegal about this and he laughed at my innocence on the subject, telling me that a company in his town has been doing just that for at least a year now. Locals are paid to produce Excel spreadsheets outlining people’s email addresses, school, work and interests then that information is processes and affiliate style emails are sent out to promote items of high interest to those users.

Man, I wish I’d thought of that. OK not really because at the end of the day I’m actually a pretty nice guy and couldn’t bring myself to do it but wow … that’s brilliant.