InfoWorld's Tom Yager has long been outspoken on matters of green computing, and in today's blog proposes an idea for energy conservation that he calls "green delay."

"When a Web site takes more than 7 seconds to be ready for interaction, it's said that a great many users will go elsewhere rather than wait the few additional seconds it might take to put up clickable buttons. Sure, time is money, but when did we start calculating the value of our time in increments of seconds or even milliseconds? "I think it's time to consider the flip side of the time/money equation: Time is carbon."

Yager's specific proposal is a painless one that actually addresses two problems at once: "Outside first-shift business hours, e-mail servers don't need to offer a quick response. ... Let's take advantage of that. Instead of treating e-mail like instant messages when recipients can't possibly read them, let there be latency."

And that added bonus? "If you make e-mail wait, you gain another benefit. Spammers have zero patience."

Posted by Caroline Craig on May 7, 2008 07:28 AM