We made it into the Adobe AIR Marketplace, if anyone wants a trial account on our 'cleartext.im' domain please ask here. A trial account gives you access to our Twitter gateway and our real time Enterprise Microblogging platform. Go to our entry in the marketplace here.
We had no idea that we made ReadWriteWeb's Top 100 Real-Time Web companies last October. Read about it here. William Mougayar of Eqentia, helped put the list and categories together.
Twitter hosted a storm, well a flash flood (#ozlog), yesterday when ZDNet published a story about the Australian Governments supposed discussions with various ISP's and industry bodies about 'data retention' as breaking news.
I want to make a few things very clear here;
To many in the industry this is far from breaking news, in fact discussions of this type can be seen back as far as 2003, maybe earlier. The current Labour govenment doesn't have a monopoly on internet filtering and tracking. To quote a colleague, "Google is your friend", go do the research and find out for yourself.
As an example the IIA put out a news release in July 2003 'IIA Releases Draft Cybercrime Code of Practice' which talked about 'rights and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers in meeting their enforcement co-operation obligations, while preserving, to the full extent the law, the sanctity of their customers' personal information'.
IIA CEO Peter Coroneos was quoted "we have been at pains to strike what we are convinced is a reasonable balance". In the ZDNet article even Electronic Frontier Australia (EFA) chair Colin Jacobs said "At some point data retention laws can be reasonable, .."
So whilst to some of those following me or the #ozlog hashtag on Twitter yesterday it may have sounded like I was defending policy like this, I wasn't, it's shit policy. But I was slightly annoyed that uninformed commentators were blowing up like this actually was news. Part of this annoyance came from the fact that we, that is the people that have been fighting this for years, could have done with some support well before now.
What I'd say to anyone pitching in on this debate is to do the research first, sure read online 'news' about this, but please go ahead and do some proper research before you start contributing online otherwise you're just making more uninformed noise.
So in summary it's not noise or poorly researched news we need, it's organised communities online and offline that governments will listen to.
So what should you do? Join the EFA, IIA or your preferred industry body, get involved and make a difference, don't just blow up today and blow away tomorrow, your privacy needs you.
by David Banes.
* Obviously I have to exclude organisations doing this as part of compliance activity!
Today we officially launched our live services and desktop messaging app. We've been in pre-release and talking to clients for a while now and even managed to sign up some early users. Read more here.
I just checked my Facebook Privacy Settings ‘What your friends can share about you through applications and websites’ and the ‘My Birthday’ was still enabled – That's a real privacy and identity theft risk as fas as I’m concerned and should be OFF by default.
Did you know that you could be recommending products and services to people on Facebook? Check out the ‘Facebook Ads’ section in you ‘My Account’ settings and turn off this feature if you’d rather not be unwittingly promoting advertisers products.
So Facebook is STILL failing on the privacy and safety issues for me, you may want to do an in depth review of ALL the settings in your Facebook account.
Our solutions are powered by XMPP but that's tough for most people to remember and when they do they generally don't have a clue what it means. So we've been looking for a more easily remembered name for this technology that underpins our solutions. Today we found it.
We've had the internet, intranets and extranets, now we have the PushNet, a real time extension of your corporate network using XMPP.
This technology allows you to participate in the real time internet and benefit from the same technology that powers services like GTalk, Google Wave, Facebook Chat and OneSocialWeb.
PushNets can be internal, connecting people and business systems or they can extend out of your organisation, as a push extension of your existing network enabling you to deliver fast reliable messaging services to your customers and business partners.
Read more on our Solutions page
This article on The Australian’s web site talks about issues around tweeting. Cleartext’s platform can address some of these issues. We believe that enabling 'social' technologies in the workplace with appropriate controls and policies is the way forward.
The article demonstrates why Cleartext ESM exists at all. What a great side story to run as the Logies was being aired, if only the news producers had known it was happening, sounds to me like The Age hadn’t a clue until Tuesday!
quote.. ‘Deveny was one of many comedians and journalists who gleefully “tweeted” during the TV Week Logies’, were the news agencies tracking the event on Twitter?
Another quote from the article;
‘”Definitely it would serve media organisations well to have a clear policy in place for social media and their uses, considering in the media sector there’s a blur between the line of journalists blogging or tweeting in a personal capacity and the fact they’re associated with the media organisation,” says Blake Dawson media lawyer Jeremy Storer.’
Yes they should, and the technology to help.
And another;
‘”Then from the journalist’s side of things, they need to be aware whatever they’re publishing is going to be read, not only by their employers but by the wider community.”‘
And archived for later eDiscovery if they are using Cleartext ESM.
And another;
‘This month a British Labour candidate, Stuart MacLennan, was sacked after his “offensive” tweets appeared in a newspaper.’
If they were on Cleartext ESM the bad language would have been filtered out.
So in summary, not only does Cleartext provide a platform for gathering, searching and filtering ‘tweets’ we also provide technology to mitigate some of the risks of open social media.