There’s a new kind of spin out there. Make a big splash announcement in a blog entry, and then follow it up (after an appreciative pile-in of positive comments) with a comment full of caveats and gotchas. It manages the bad news, and keeps people from finding out what you’re really doing.

Microsoft recently made a big splash about the much-awaited release of IE6 for Windows Mobile, and then went and hid the bad news in a blog comment. You might still think that all recent WinMo devices will be upgraded with the new browser, but you’d be wrong. After all, that’s what Microsoft implied when it first announced the new browser project over 18 months ago at the last MEDC in Las Vegas, when it indicated that there’d finally be some respite from the much disliked browser that ships with its mobile operating system.

But what the blog promises, the comments taketh away.

It turns out that the new browser, which was Windows Mobile’s main hope in the battle with the latest WebKit-powered phones, will only run on new hardware.

As the comment said:

Regarding making IE Mobile available as a separate download or update, the rich media experiences that IE Mobile 6 enables require more powerful, advanced devices. That is why it will not be available as an upgrade or direct download for current phones, but rather will be made available on new phones.

It’s not that new phones are necessarily going to be more powerful than the phones already on the market. I suspect a Samsung Omina or HTC Touch Pro user is going to be quite offended by the thought that their top-of-the-range device with the latest processors will be consider inferior to a budget ARM-powered device that just happens to ship after Microsoft releases WinMo 6.1.4.

If you’ve got a current phone, then sorry, thanks for all the support, you’re going to be left behind. Sure, there’s the promise of Mozilla’s Fennec next year sometime, or the pay-for Opera Mobile today, but that’s not the same as a first class integral browser. Is it any wonder HTC are making Opera the default browser on their latest devices?

Why can’t Microsoft leave it up to the operators and the handset manufacturers as to whether they can ship updaters (or heaven forfend that Microsoft use the Windows Update tool in the latest Windows Mobile builds to actually ship an update). By all means profile devices to see if they’re able to run the new browser before opffering a download, but don’t leave users second class citizenson the web.

There is no mobile web. WebKit and the iPhone have given that concept the kick into touch that it so rightly needed. There is only one web, and millions of Windows Mobile users have been given a glimpse of it, before being told that it’s not for them. Is it any wonder they’re deserting the platform for iPhones and BlackBerrys? The next major release is now over a year away, and Microsoft’s main competitors are streaking ahead with new form factors, new devices, and better user interfaces. Windows Mobile 6.5 is a finger in the dyke, but it’s too obviously a stop gap.

Even companies that have built themselves on Windows Mobile are walking away. Why else has HTC started shipping Android-based devices? Microsoft appears to have no faith in its mobile OS, and the industry is responding to its inactions.

I’d like to be wrong, but I don’t think I am. I’ve been a Windows Mobile user for years, but I recently switched to the iPhone 3G. Everything I could do on my Windows Mobile device I can do on the iPhone - even administer my Windows Servers - and I can do it with a 21st century user experience, not something that still feels like a cut-down version of Windows 95. The only thing my HTC Kaiser is left doing is turn-by-turn GPS - and I have a feeling that the iPhone may well be doing that soon, too.

–Simon

On a smartphone, passwords are even more irritating than ever, especially on a soft keyboard that’s so sure it knows what you want to type that the default is to correct what you actually wrote. That’s only a trimester if the phone has as big a vocabulary as you do.

For instance, when I started writing this on my Samsung Blackjack II with xt9, what I typed in the previous sentence was ‘timesaver’ - before xt9 ‘ corrected’ it… xt9 gives you the option to stick with your actual typing as long as you notice the change and the equally aggressive correction on the iPhone does the same (though I’ve never managed it myself), but it’s one more way that passwords are more likely to trip you up than keep you secure. Let alone that the UK now has the worst information theft figures in Europe, even though the French have the least secure passwords.

Switching to information cards where claims like who I am and whether I’m over 18 are encrypted, hashed and sent on demand to replace simple username and password makes logging on simpler and more secure, and makes it possible to add extra authentication. After complaining about Microsoft not issuing secure ‘managed’ cards I’ve been told to wait a few days for a major announcement; it might be the Equifax over-18 I-card service https://equifaxicards.com/imover/overview.do (only for the US at the moment, but it’s the first major public verified information card and it will soon be followed by cards to prove your credit rating, contact details or membership).

So that leaves getting sites and services to accept information cards - and being able to use them on any computer. They’re built into Vista, Windows 7 and any PC with IE7, plus there are open source plugins for Firefox and Safari.  And now there’s a completely unofficial implementation for the iPhone - which you can’t use.

Developed by Markus Sabadello, who works at Parity, it’s in two parts. The I-Card Manager (http://www.iphoneicards.com/)  shows up as an app in the usual place and lets you access cards you have stored with Parity’s free AZigo online card storage service (www.azigo.com- this is the easiest way to share cards between different PCs that you use) and see what details are on each cards.

There wouldn’t be any problem putting the iPhone I-Card Manager on the AppStore, but it’s no use without the iPhone I-Card Selector. This is a plug-in for Mobile Safari that lets you click the i-card login on a Web page and pick the card you want to submit.

And as Apple hasn’t published an SDK for writing browser plugins and won’t distribute them through the AppStore, you have to jailbreak your phone to install it.

Although there was huge enthusiasm at the Internet Identity Workshop where Markus demonstrated his application (and a petition was set up to send to Apple), the general consensus was that Apple would wait until the standard had actually taken off to integrate it. That’s a shame because, as I say, a phone is where typing a password is the most painful and relieving that pain would be an excellent way of pushing the adoption of information cards.
-Mary

The other day I finally bit the bullet, and traded in my old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny iPhone. I’d been using one to write some tutorials for IT Pro, and had finally got used to its touch keyboard - and had become used to the large screen and the high quality web browsing experience. I’d also started playing with the AppStore, and had found applications like Evernote, which promised to bring web, phone and desktop together. My memory is pretty bad most of the time, and a tool that could help me remember the things I’d seen seemed to be a rather good idea.

There was just one problem - the iPhone’s camera. I’m not complaining about its 2Mpx resolution,  or even the lack of a video feed. They’re all par for the course with a cameraphone (unless you plump for those phones that are more camera than phone), and the iPhone’s is actually a pretty decent camera - most of the time. Where it falls down is its focal length. It’s great for portraits, for landscapes, as it’s a fixed focus camera that can keep most things in focus - as long as they’re more than about three feet away.

Using Evernote I found I was wanting to take phtographs of pieces of text: the backs of business cards, notes scrawled on napkins,  whiteboards. Evernote has a good online OCR service, putting OCR in the cloud and not on the phone, but it couldn’t cope with the iPhone’s blurry out of focus images.

Last week I got an email from the PR for Griffin, best known as one of the original iPod accessory companies.  They’d just announced a new “business” case for the iPhone 3G, one that included what could be the solution to my iPhone text photography problem.

What was it?

A macro lens.

A couple of years ago Mary and I looked at a barcode recognition service that Microsoft Research was trying out. Like me, they’d found that phone cameras couldn’t cope with  close-ups. They’d chosen to have stick on macro lenses manufactured, and for some time my tubby HTC Titan had a strange extra lens on the back.

Griffin’s Clarifi case is less obtrusive, with a little extra lens that slides over the camera slot in the case. It’s a workable solution, and it’s easy to quickly put the lens in place when you want to take a close-up photograph.

The million dollar question is, of course, “does it work?”. The answer is a qualified yes. It’s not perfect (but then plastic lenses rarely are), but it is a considerable improvement over Apple’s standalone fixed-focus implementation.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well!

One more step along the road to finding my ideal portable device.

Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.

The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…

Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.

Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary

When your battery runs out, your laptop is nothing more than a paperweight. More portable devices like the recent rash of ‘netbooks’ have short battery life – as low as 90 minutes for some of the Asus Eees – but at least they’re a lighter brick to carry around once they go flat. One of the reasons I haven’t personally seen the appeal of these little machines is that I already have a notebook that runs for an eight-hour working day without me checking behind cupboards for a power socket every few hours.

The HP 2710p tablet claims a nine hour battery life with the clip-on lithium polymer slab that adds a few millimeters to its thickness and I really do get over eight hours form it. The new model, the EliteBook 2730p, promises 12 hours – or 14 if I pay extra for the SSD drive. It’s a combination of the LED backlight and other low-power components and a large cubic volume of battery.

And if I wanted a 14.1” screen and didn’t mind it not being a tablet (I know I’m unusual in finding the ability to have all my written notes for years past in the same place as my typed notes invaluable, although I’m not sure why everyone doesn’t find this as useful as I do), the extra surface area would mean that with the same style of clip-on extra battery the EliteBook 6930p would give me a full 24 hours of work (or play).

That’s with the Intel SSDs announced at IDF the other week, but they only add an extra 7% to battery life. The real benefit of the Intel SSD is the 57% improvement in performance and the six times faster data transfer, but the extra speed means that the other components can go into low power states rather than waiting for a lower power but slower flash drive, which is why Intel may really deliver the promised benefits of flash drives. The rest of it comes first from improvements through the system – like more power-efficient Intel graphics drivers - and secondly from the sheer area of battery.

Although the first new battery chemistry in a long time will finally be available next year – silver zinc, which manufacturer ZPower says is 30-40% better than lithium ion – adopting a new battery type is very expensive for PC manufacturers. There’s proving it really does last longer, doing all the safety testing, changing all the charging circuitry and power adapters… and obviously it’s the buyer who will be paying for that, which means that customers have to make it very clear if they’re prepared to buy PCs with new types of battery rather than spending the extra money on an extended battery.

I used to track new battery chemistries closely and impatiently. Since I got the extended battery for the 2710p I’ve found myself feeling much less impatient. In my personal equation the 6930p would be too big to be worth the 24 hours of battery life. Getting four more hours of battery at the same weight as the 6210p is irresistible. And anyone who isn’t trying to cram a laptop in a handbag should find leaving the power supply at home almost priceless.

-Mary

Never heard of MWg? You’re not alone, but you might want to hunt down the Zinc II. For one thing, it’s cheaper than the HTC Touch Pro or TyTN II although it has much the same features. For another, it’s stylish and surprisingly sleek for a phone with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

I’ve been swapping between the Zinc II, the TyTN II and my trusty HTC Excalibur (better known as the T-Mobile Dash) in an effort to fulfill my new year’s resolution about always having navigation with me. Google Maps does very well at location on some phones, but on my Excalibur it’s far from accurate so I’m looking for GPS. And while EDGE is OK for quick searches, I want 3G - mainly so I can use the phone as a modem with my laptop. I know built-in 3G is always better, to the tune of 25% better bandwidth, but not every laptop I use has it. I want Windows Mobile 6.1 for two things; threaded text messages and being able to search my email on Exchange Server from the phone inbox. I have a US Samsung BlackJack II which might be ideal - it’s the closest to the size of the Excalibur so far - but it’s very thoroughly locked to its US carrier.

The TyTN II is a great phone - and as the Stella from O2 it comes with CoPilot, which is my favourite GPS tool - but it’s just a bit too big and slab-like for me personally. Plus the tilt action is great for viewing the screen, but it covers the two action buttons on the keyboard. The Zinc II is a little bit lighter, a little bit smaller and a lot sleeker, with a soft-touch easy-grip rubberized coating and a flush screen - it’s a very comfortable handful even for those of us with smaller hands. It also has a faster processor, which means the camera doesn’t make you wait an age to take your snap and it doesn’t get bogged down with lots of apps running in the background.

That’s handy as with the TouchFLO-style Quick Menu launching from what I expected to be the Start button, I found it easier to launch a new app than get back to the one I’d been using. Swiping your finger across the screen to turn between the pages of buttons and tapping to open apps is a good way to work in Windows Mobile Professional; my nails work pretty well instead of a stylus but menus are still pretty tiny. 

The keyboard isn’t going to suit everyone. The keys are almost flush and don’t click down very far, but they have enough action so you know you’ve actually hit the key and not having discrete keys means - practically - that you won’t get dirt, dust and sesame seeds creeping under them. I’m used to the square layout of the Excalibur (and every BlackBerry I’ve ever known) and having the wide rows of keys slows me down until I adjust, plus the central spacebar isn’t quite in the right place for me. As always, secondary keys are distributed around the keyboard seemingly at random so you’re hunting for the dash and the @ symbol; it really is time we had a standard for this. But each key is outlined in blue light which is one, rather cool and two, really helpful in dim light.

MWg used to be O2 Asia’s device arm; they’ve expanded out to the US and Europe, renamed the company as the Mobile World Group and teamed up with gadget specialists Expansys. You’re not going to see the Zinc II on the high street unless they get another distribution deal, but it’s well worth checking out.
-Mary

Imagine a second, simpler operating system on your PC with fixed features, so it’s more secure - after all, if you can’t add more programs you can’t add a virus either. It would have to start up quickly, so that Windows wasn’t waiting for it, so it would be ideal for listening to music and watching video. I’m not thinking about virtualization per se, although that’s one way to achieve something similar; this is two operating systems side by side, both with access to the PC hardware, but one of them does much more limited and circumscribed things.

Can you tell what it is yet?

No, actually, I’m not talking about Palladium - sorry, Microsoft Next Generation Secure Computing Base. That grew out of an attempt to reassure Sony that it would be OK to allow DVD movies to play on a PC without piracy becoming endemic and turned into a much more useful and visionary idea about using public key cryptography not to identify people but to secure machines. It would have been a good way to implement the DRM it was associated with in the public eye, though wouldn’t have forced it on anyone who didn’t want to run it. Palladium loaded a secure piece of software called the TOR that acted as a secure area that could only run trusted code (written to public APIs), where the apps would be invisible to the main OS - all secured by the machine-specific key in your TPM and some new technology from Intel. 

Ironically, trust was the issue with Palladium; nobody trusted Microsoft to either be building a secure system that didn’t impact on a very robust interpretation of free speech or if it was, to do it right. The smallest part of the concept made it in a couple of versions of Vista as BitLocker; whole disk encryption secured by the TPM.
But the Palladium concepts are showing up in a lot of other places, including the NSA’s Security Enhanced Linux and Citrix’s Security Enhanced Xen - a small OS that runs as a secure virtual machine with isolated applications, using the TPM and Intel’s new hardware virtualization technology …

Intel even uses the words Trusted Computing Base, which might be a hostage to fortune given the fate of Palladium. The DRM discussion hasn’t started yet, but there’s a trusted channel to the keyboard, mouse, memory - and the graphics subsystem, which is what some thought would allow copy-protected DVDs to be watched in the secure area of Palladium, without the option to copy them. This time around it’s more likely to be copy-protected downloads: killing off HD DVD has actually made Blu-Ray less likely to get mass adoption,  as player and disc prices stay high.

There are far more benefits to Palladium-style secure computing than protecting the movie industry or saving the banking industry from having to upgrade anti-fraud backends. You may keep your AV up to date and your company documents secure, but one in six of all PCs that touch the Google site has a bot and they’re all sending you spam.

And while the systems that look so much like Palladium that I get déjà vu are still a little way off, Asus is already selling machines with Express Gate. Granted, this is more like the embedded operating systems you see on a lot of media notebooks; it boots up in eight seconds and lets you see your photos and play your music. It has an Internet connection, so you can browse the Web without waiting for Windows. But it also uses the TPM in Montevina and you can treat it as an isolated operating system, says the press release: “Friends and family can use your notebook to nip online, use IM, listen to music, play and view without having access to your data, the system or the Windows environment.” Very Palladian.
-Mary

I wouldn’t be surprised to open a packet of cornflakes  and have a 3G USB dongle fall out, they’re getting so common. They may be convenient but they’re not the most efficient way to get a 3G connection on a laptop. A notebook with a built-in antenna gets 25% better bandwidth (because the better the signal, the more data throughput you get). And given that most 3G cells have only a 1Mbps pipe connecting them to the Internet , you need all the throughput you can get. 

The rumblings about EU regulation of SMS and mobile data costs carry on in the background along with OFCOM’s proposals for a voluntary code of conduct for ISPs to make sure your DSL line gives you the speed you’ve paid for, and OFCOM has also been making noises about checking out what speeds mobile broadband really offers. It’s a nice idea and it might concentrate the attention of the operators on the issue, but the speed you get depends on a mix of your handset, the Internet backhaul of the base station, how many other people are using data on the same base station - and the weather, so it’s hard to be precise.

I was impressed by the independent tests that Vodafone was trumpeting last month claiming they have the fastest HSDPA network. They’re claiming up to ten seconds faster to download a 2MB MP3 file (13.54 seconds) and four times faster to open a Web page (6.7 seconds). Anecdotally, Vodafone does feel faster than T-Mobile and Orange in the areas of London we visit, on EDGE and on HSDPA. With BT’s announcement today that it’s dropping backhaul pricing, if the mobile operators put in connections from the base stations to the Internet that are as fast as your connection from your phone to the base station, we’ll start to see which side of the network really needs to speed up.

I expect better battery life is also going to be better when you’re using built-in 3G than when you’re going through a USB port. The voltage won’t be much different but you can have much more sophisticated power management - and of course if you have a better signal, you don’t have to keep turning the radio up to try and improve things.

So Lenovo’s Centrino 2 announcements caught my eye today. Either the growth in the dongle market means Ericsson has dropped the prices of its 3G modules (scale, competition or a mix of the two) or Lenovo has decided that 3G is the best way to fight off the buzz around ultra-cheap machines like the Eee PC and Aspire One that cut features along with the price. Whichever it is, Lenovo is dropping the price premium for built-in 3G from around £100 to around nothing: from August 4th notebooks with a mobile broadband module will cost, and I quote, ”approximately the same price as those without”.

Although BT is now referring to the still-in-draft 802.11n proposal as a standard and putting it in the shiny new BT Home Hub (the rotating ten foot model of it at the BT event last night was a little scary), the n debacle drags on. At this rate, we might have HSDPA built into more laptops than 802.11n…
-Mary

I’ve been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO’s iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Apple does provide a tool for helping configure multiple devices, and if you don’t use it each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

There is one big omission which will hamper the iPhone’s enterprise uptake: mail isn’t encrypted. So if your business is regulated in any way, and your staff work with sensitive information, then the iPhone - version 2.0 or not - will be strictly off limits. The fact there’s also no remote wipe (Apple says you can use Exchange’s tools for this, but our test device couldn’t be seen in Exchange’s device management tools) or device management beyond setup tools will also count against Apple’s latest software releases. Until Apple really understands the needs of enterprises the iPhone will remain the shiny phone on the CEO’s desk, not the workhorse device used by hundreds and thousands of staff.

Still, it is only a second generation device, and there’s plenty of time for Apple to fix its deficiencies.

If you really do want to use the iPhone with Exchange, what’s the experience like? We took some screenshots to show you what you and your users will see.

Making the inital connection is easy - all you need are an email address, a user name and password, and the DNS name of the Exchange server on the public internet. Once connected to an Exchange server you can manage accounts from the iPhone’s settings menu. You’re able to quickly switch functions, as well as choosing just how much mail is synchronised.

Mail can be pushed automatically using Exchange’s built-in ActiveSync (Apple has licensed it from Microsoft), or can be collected on a schedule. If you’re roaming and need to keep data bills to a minimum, switching to a manual fetch will help keep data traffic to a minimum - as well as increasing battery life!

Once you’ve set up Exchange mail, you’ll be able to see a list of all the mail folders in your Exchange account. The iPhone (unlike other mobile devices) will only automatically synchronise your main inbox, and you’ll need to manually download the contents of any other folders you wish to read.

Of course Apple handles HTML mail just fine, and you’ll get a good overview of your mailbox contents with headers and the first couple of lines of any message.

Mail doesn’t take up that much space - a large Exchange account (with sensible download windows) will only take a few tens of MB out of the iPhone’s 8 or 16GB storage. That leaves you plenty of space for applications - which already include tools from Salesforce.com and from Oracle. Applications download from the App Store, and open from the familiar launcher.

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you’ll find the image in the device’s camera roll.)

–Simon

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

Some people are losing access to IM as well, which is stupidly counter-productive because it’s a fantastic work tool. Blocking IM is like not providing a telephone. I’m less certain about work use of social networks and blogs, because although they have some work benefits like networking, it’s often the employee rather than the company that gets the benefits - I might be networking to find a contact for my current project but if I move on, that contact isn’t much use to my company. And while I could see your status on Facebook, I could see it on IM as well, without the potential distractions. And let’s face it, Facebook is 99% distraction…

The Telegraph reported last year that 70% of UK companies agree with me and are blocking sites like Facebook. But I - and they - might well be wrong. Dell announced today that it’s giving all employees access to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and other social sites because productivity issues pale into insignificance besides being out of touch with your customers. Dell opened up to Facebook weeks ago so staff could join in a competition it was running, but given how hard Dell is trying to look like a company that listens to customers, it’s useful for employees to be able to defend the company, solve user problems or just hear what its customers are saying to their friends. Passionate Dell employees are to feel more appreciated than the British Airways employees who defend the company in Facebook groups on their own time.

Marc Smith at Microsoft Research has spent years tracking online interactions - not to accuse people of wasting time, but to understand online social dynamics. He thinks Dell has the right idea because it’s finding out more about itself and “self awareness is such a powerful tool for businesses.” You could spend a lot of money on surveys, focus groups, BI tools and company meetings to find out what customers think of you and communicate that around the company. Or you could let everyone rub shoulders with customers and find out first hand.

If you want your employees keeping your users happy online, on top of not blocking their access, Smith suggests thinking of ways to give them credit for the time they put in helping them. Microsoft in Brazil was worried when all the discussion on a once-popular area of the official site went away; it turned out it had moved to a newsgroup that was tracked by Smith’s Netscan tool, because people liked being able to see when they contributed the most answers. If employees want access to Facebook, turn that into a business benefit by tracking who helps the most customers. Some supervision is going to be a good thing, along with a policy on what people can and can’t say; you can go into detail, or you can stick with something simple like the Microsoft blogging policy, which states that you have to be smart to work at Microsoft so don’t do anything stupid online.

But even if people are reading Facebook and LiveJournal and other sites for fun rather than work, I’m pretty sure management rather than censorship is the solution. This is nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with management and motivation. If you trust your users to have a phone on their desk and not spend the whole day talking to friends, can’t you trust them not to waste the day chatting in IM pr throwing food on Facebook?

People who lose a day to reading non-work Web pages of any kind - whether it’s Facebook or the BBC News or eBay or cat macros or anything else - are goofing off and you should be able to tell that through your normal management procedures. If you can’t tell whether someone is doing a good job by what they deliver, counting up the time they spend not working isn’t the answer, but monitoring is better than saying to your employees that you don’t trust them to behave professionally. Now that the work-life boundaries are not so much blurred as completely muddied, someone who spends an hour after lunch staying in touch with friends probably spends an hour after dinner catching up on work too.

I remember the week I discovered Usenet (my supervisor introduced me to it the first time we discussed my MSc thesis). I don’t remember much else I did that week; it was a huge distraction and I plunged straight in for hours on end. And at the end of the week I looked at how much time I’d wasted and thought ‘I’d better not spend too much time on this, I have work to do’.

Plus, once you’ve pushed them onto a mobile device that uses 3G rather than your Wi-Fi then you’ve lost all chance of tracking what they’re up to - and maybe they’re no longer as passionate about defending your company online either.
-Mary