Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

What place does twitter have in a corporate environment? Social networking sites such as facebook is largely banned in corporate workplaces, especially government departments. Most of these places also feel threatened by the idea of instant messaging and suspect that their workers become less productive as a result. And maybe they are right in some circumstances.

Twitter can be abused as can IM and facebook. If all workers are using these “tools” for is to share pics of their weekend parties, and organise their social lives then they are effectively “stealing” time from their employer. And their employer can rightly block that sort of behaviour.

So what is the place of these activities?

The want for easy as sharing of photos, documents and what not between your computer, your relatives computer, and your friends computer, is now answered through the words Live Mesh.
It is rather brilliant, very useful, and so easy to understand and use.

My favourite best friend and I often have spent long periods of time uploading photos using photo swap on msn, and I am pleased to say those days are over. All I have to do is create a Live Mesh folder, invite her to join it, and once she accepts she can view and use any photos or files I put in that folder, and she can put any of her things in that folder for me to use as well. It’s all about easy sharing.

My home computer, my work computer, my best friends computer, and her laptop, can all be synchronized in the same folder allowing easy access for whatever files we want to share. And, my home computer, my work computer, and my bosses computer, can all be synchronized in another folder, easy as sharing.

Here’s a rough step by step of the getting started process. It’s easier done than said :)

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)