Loosing Site

Google has launched Sites, a product developed from its 2006 JotSpot acquisition.

Designed for team based site building and collaboration, the application can be used to build intranets, projects spaces, on-line classrooms and generic web sites.

Welcome to Google Sites via kwout

Sites are built from combinations of:

• Web pages with WYSIWYG editing and version control.
• Dashboards composed of collections of gadgets.
• Dated announcements that act as internal blogs.
• File Cabinets used for storing and describing binary files.
• Sortable Lists.

Pages can be enhanced with gadgets that integrate with other Google services:

• Calendars
• Documents
• Picassa web slideshows
• Spreadsheets
• Spreadsheet Forms
• Presentations
• YouTube
• Google Video

Specialised gadgets help with navigation

• Table of Contents
• Recent Posts
• Recent Uploaded Files
• Text Blocks

Any standard gadget from the iGoogle directory can be embedded in a page, as can Google Mashups and bespoke gadgets built on top of the Google Gadget API.

Sites has a small collection of themes. Additional options give a more refined control over backgrounds, logos, color schemes and fonts. The visual appearance will be adequate for many applications, but will not be sufficiently distinctive for sites that require strong branding and highly distinctive visuals.

While Sites is best suited to intranet/workgroup use, the easy integration with other feeds and services makes it a platform worth considering for public facing content driven applications, particularly those that integrate data from a variety of sources.

Official Google Blog: Bringing it all together via kwout

Integrating well with Google Apps for Teams, Google Sites is in direct competition with Microsoft Sharepoint. It again uses a bottom up marketing strategy, allowing workgroups to introduce technical solutions linked via company email addresses.

In a recent Independent on Sunday article David Randall and Victoria Richards paint a gloomy picture of on-line privacy, highlighting a number of incidents in which employers and educators have used online social networks to gather information about their current and prospective employees and students.

Facebook can ruin your life. And so can MySpace, Bebo… – News, Gadgets & Tech – Independent.co.uk via kwout

Whilst those who brag about engaging in criminal activities on social networks can legitimately expect to have the information they’ve shared come back to haunt them; should employers, recruiters and educators assume the same rights as the police or the security services?

The terms and conditions of social networks often restrict activity to personal use only.

“You understand that except for advertising programs offered by us on the Site (e.g., Facebook Flyers, Facebook Marketplace), the Service and the Site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only.”

Facebook | Terms of Use

Any employer using these networks to gather intelligence about an employee will be violating the terms of service by gathering personal data for commercial use.

Ownership of content is generally retained by the users of social networks.

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

Google Terms of Service (covering Orkut)

In many cases media displayed in social networks are stored on separate hosting services with their own conditions and requirements, and have the additional protection of declaring Creative Commons licenses that explicitly state the media are for non-commercial use.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States via kwout

Employers who include text and images from social networks as evidence at an industrial tribunal will be violating the copyright of the very employees they are in conflict with.  Employees who are unlikely to waive the unnegotiated (and presumably quite high) fees for the prejudicial use of their intellectual property.

Even where an image is marked as available for commercial use issues of privacy and model consent remain.

On the Texas suit against Virgin and Creative Commons (Lessig Blog) via kwout

Employers and educators who violate privacy should be aware that they may also be violating contract law and copyright law. They should be unsurprised if they face legal consequences as a result, and should budget accordingly.

The question is, who will sue first:

• individuals protecting their privacy

• content owners protecting their intellectual property rights

• service providers protecting their users and their market share

• the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, because that’s what they do

Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation via kwout

Welcome to Google Apps via kwout

The release of the Team Edition of Google Apps has been met with a mixture of delight and hostility. Google’s decision to assist and encourage the ad-hoc implementation of externally hosted groupware solutions has not been well received by some IT Managers who have expressed concerns over security, reliability, regulatory compliance and the ownership of organization’s IT strategy.

Others acknowledge the frustrations experienced by end users of unresponsive IT departments.

Web Worker Daily » Archive Collaborate and Subvert Your IS Department with Google Apps Team Edition « via kwout

An overview of the Team Edition features can be seen in this video.

A component of Google’s strategy appears to be the encouragement of bottom up adoption in large organizations leading to Premier Edition upgrades at $50 per user per year. Case Studies of SF Bay Pediatrics and Arizona State University who were early adopters of the Premier Edition are included below.

Security concerns about the team edition should be set in the context of current common practices which includes:

• sending documents as attachments in unencrypted emails
• carrying documents on data pens
• carrying sensitive documents on laptops
• mailing and loosing data CDs

The question is then whether security is endangered or enhanced by the use of encrypted web applications. The recent addition of Postini in the Premier edition provides a useful security enhancement, checking emails and messages to enforce regulatory compliance when social security, credit card and other sensitive information is detected.

The wisdom of adopting a bottom up approach to entering the enterprise remains to be seen. Once the dust from the hyperbole surrounding security and authority issues has settled the real work of evaluating functions and risk can begin. If nothing else, the launch had underlined the importance of engaging users in the process of managing their technology and security; particularly when expedient options are conveniently available.

I imagine some IT Directors may envy smaller organizations where budgets and staffing levels constrain the choices to a narrower set of options.

Xpenser is a perfect illustration of a data flow service. It simplifies the recording of business expenses, producing simple reports and recording the various stages of reimbursement.

Xpenser – Tour via kwout

The applications strengths are in its convenience and simplicity. Once an account is set up expenses can be logged by:

• email
• SMS
• instant messaging
• voice
• web site
• browser toolbars

In all cases, the message takes a simple standard form

e.g. “lunch $35 with Fred, Ginger”

Xpenser then parses your message extracting a category, price and notes to add to a fresh entry in your current report. When you’re ready to process your expenses you can export your data in Excel, Quicken, MS Money or Freshbooks format.

You can also export your data as a secure RSS feed for display or transformation. With an API in the pipeline Xpenser will be capable of tighter integration with other business systems.

From May 2008 eBay sellers will no longer be able to give negative feedback about buyers. The change is intended to eliminate retaliatory feedback. Some sellers delay giving feedback until they have seen how the buyer has rated them. If the buyer is negative they respond in kind, then offer mutual feedback withdrawal to protect the reputations of both parties.

eBay – The Chatter via kwout

In the new system sellers will be unable to give negative feedback about buyers, though they may still optionally give positive feedback. As a balancing protection eBay will suspend buyers who use the threat of negative feedback to extort changes in agreed conditions.

Upcoming Changes to Feedback via kwout

The aim is to improve buyer trust and confidence. With the fear of retaliatory negative feedback removed, eBay believes that buyers will be more honest and open in their rating and commenting. Consequently the best performing sellers will be able to distinguish themselves.

eBay Feedback Profile for colourmartuk via kwout

At the top end of the performance range, it is difficult to see how a store like Colourmart could improve it’s near perfect, and wholly genuine, feedback score. Colourmart is a UK cashmere supplier that combines superb quality, low prices and excellent customer service. Their quality of service can be seen not just in their eBay statistics but also in their Yahoo Group discussions.

While Colourmart’s score could not become more perfect, others may fall further behind. Whether or not an individual supplier has been intentionally gaming the system, any delay in giving feedback after payment can look like a veiled threat to a buyer, resulting in false positive feedback or the absence of negative feedback. With that perception removed eBay’s change should result in a broader spread of feedback scores. Whether the desired results are achieved will become apparent after the introduction of the new system in May.

Meanwhile, with the opening up of the social graph it is now possible to manage and monitor reputations outside of mainstream auction and merchant sites. Rapleaf, for example, collects positive, neutral and negative ratings from buyers, sellers, swappers and friends; making the ratings available through their website, or through buttons that you can embed in your own sites and profiles – though not on eBay where RapLeaf is banned.

Rapleaf: Better World Books via kwout

Some eBay sellers may rebel and adopt an alternative rating services. Alexa statistics show that RapLeaf has experienced a noticeable increase in page views following eBay’s announcement.

While any system can be gamed, it’s the processes and networks within and around the system that limit the extent of the abuse. At the moment eBay’s feedback system looks more like a round of Prisoner’s Dilemma than a rating tool.