John Beatty, 49 year old Real Estate Photographer, has a history of quietly influencing the internet over the course of a few decades. He even claims that he invented spam. Now he wants you to play his daily word puzzle game.
YORK, PA, July 30, 2025 /24-7PressRelease/ — It started with a love of programming, a Mustek color scanner, and an AOL 2.5 account in 1995. At the time, only 9% of Americans were connecting to the internet. The majority of these users were on America Online, where they could mingle in chat rooms, send emails, instant message, browse the web, and play games.
At 19, John moved to York, PA, with two roommates, hoping to earn enough to bring his now-wife to York and start a life together. His wife, raising their first child alone with her parents at just 18, was facing a tough time. John worked various jobs in the York area, trying to make enough money to send back to his family. With a passion for computer programming, he had an idea after noticing people in chat rooms requesting others to mail them photos.
Frequently visiting the computer department at Sears in the York Galleria Mall, he discovered the very first consumer-level color scanner for photos had just arrived. Having already used his Sears card to purchase a 75MHz Packard Bell computer, he had a brilliant idea: people could mail him photos, he would scan them to make digital copies, and then email the images back to them.
John was already experienced with Visual Basic, one of the first GUI-based developer tools created by Microsoft. So he built a program that would interact with AOL software by automatically visiting every chat room it could find throughout the day. The program would collect the list of usernames from each room and add them to a massive contact list.
Once he had compiled a large list of usernames, he wrote another program that would automatically send a spam email to all the names by interacting with AOL.
After sending his first batch of about 500 emails, the response was even better than he had expected. His pitch was: “$5.00 for 5 photos.” He said, “Mail me your photos with a $5 bill, and I’ll send your photos back and email you the five digitized copies.” A week later, envelopes started rolling in, and John was making some extra cash.
Almost a year went by, and John scanned and digitized hundreds of photos. He always explained in the email that no nudity was allowed, but as the number of disturbing submissions increased, John decided to stop and focus on other projects.
He went on to create dozens of popular websites, including the world’s most visited site among teenagers in the early 2000s, where everyone went to get Buddy Icons for AOL Instant Messenger. He later continued with sites like Avatar Magic and Caption.It, where users could create customized images for their MySpace pages.
In 2005, John even made a viral version of Google called Gizoogle, where users could search Google and get results rewritten in a humorous Snoop Dogg-inspired style. Even today, a version of it lives on at https://gizoogle.net, using the original logo and crediting John on the About page.
Today, John and his wife Jen own a real estate photography company. He spends most of his time capturing and delivering content for real estate agents. But in his spare time, he enjoys working on side projects—like the one he just created for fun: Totem Words (TotemWords.com), a daily word puzzle game featuring adorable AI-generated icons representing different categories.
From 1995 to 2005, the internet was the Wild West in many ways. It wasn’t until 2003 that AOL finally introduced a spam folder, after recognizing that internet marketing was starting to spiral out of control. John never intended for his spamming to be malicious—he genuinely saw a need for a service and figured out how to meet that need by, inadvertently, inventing spam.
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