Advantages of Using Social Sentry According to Teneros:

• Social Discovery - Discover employee social network presence across Twitter, Facebook and other social networks
• Anywhere Monitoring - Monitor employee social network activity occurring from any device
• Automated Rules Engine - Create advanced content monitoring rules with automatic notifications and alerts
• Reporting & Analytics - Create reports and analyze social network usage by employees across time, source and network

Track Your Employees Across the Web

Social Sentry gives employers the ability to track their employees' online activity, provides granular real-time tracking and allows employers to "monitor employee public communication happening from any location, within the corporate network or public Internet." The services gives employers the ability to monitor select users or the entire employee base.

The idea behind this, of course, is to make sure that employees don't leak sensitive information on social networks or engage in any behavior that could damage a company's reputation. From a corporation's point of view, this makes complete sense. After all, these companies have to ensure that their secrets are protected, compliance regulations are followed and risky behavior by their employees is exposed quickly. On the other hand, most employees would probably have strong feelings about a system that constantly tracks their every move on the Internet (even if they use an alias, by the way).

If The Data is Already Public, Is Aggregating it an Invasion of Privacy?

Of course, Social Sentry only tracks information that is already public, but as Danah Boyd noted in her SXSW keynote earlier this month, even the aggregation of seemingly public data can quickly feel like an invasion of privacy. Until now, tracking data from all your employees would have been an arduous and costly task, but with a program like Social Sentry, it's automated, easy and relatively cheap.

How Would You Feel if Your Employer Used Social Sentry?

How would you feel if your employer started using Social Sentry and kept track of all of your comments on Twitter and YouTube? Would you be okay with that? Is it just the same as a drug test and a background check, or would you quit your job if your employer started using this tool?

Although most I.T. managers probably know that Web 2.0 applications are in use on their network, when comparing the survey results to the actual data, it appears they don't know how pervasive their use is.

FaceTime discovered that across the 80 companies studied, an average of 49 Web 2.0 applications were installed across locations. (It's worth pointing out that FaceTime counts everything from IM to IPTV as "Web 2.0," by the looks of the data, so take that finding with a grain of salt.)

Still, what is interesting in the data returned is that while only 60% I.T. managers surveyed thought that social networking applications were being used in their location, there wasn't a single company in FaceTime's study where social networking wasn't being used on at least one of the employee's machines.

As you may have guessed, Facebook was the most popular site overall, appearing in 50,000 instances across all 80 reporting locations. However, there was a total of 400 unique social networking sites reported in use. This "long tail effect," says FaceTime, should not be ignored when determining which sites to monitor and control for potential security and compliance issues.

Other popular activities included instant messaging (AIM and GoogleTalk were most prevalent), Meebo, IPTV, Virtual Worlds, VOIP (like Skype), P2P, and web conferencing.

Whether or not companies should be cracking down on these and other self-provisioned applications is a debate for another time. What's clear is that companies that think they have cracked down, are sadly mistaken.

Concurrently with this report - and perhaps because they were surprised by their own findings - FaceTime just launched a "Forget the Fees" program that eliminates the URL filtering fees for their customers. Because obviously, FaceTime's customers either weren't managing their network because they couldn't afford to do so...or they were just really cool about what their employees did at work.

"It became very, very evident to me that as technology moves forward, there will come a day where we'll be able to not just create animation based upon our comic books and our characters and stories that we've told, but there will come a time when eventually we'll be able to take existing comic art, the flat, static art, and be able to animate it," said Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. "So [now] we can put out a product that is not quite a comic book and not quite animation, [but] a wonderful hybrid that incorporates all of our great talents."

X-Men and Spider-Woman are among the first books to take on the new format. No pricing or release date has been set.

While printed works have always held promise on iTunes - and the iPhones and iPods that derive content from it - this new comic format could be the perfect fit for the handheld Apple devices that excel with audio and video.

When you combine the Apple hardware - or any device capable of playing iTunes content - with the geek appeal of Marvel's universe of heroes, this seems like a sure winner for both Marvel and iTunes.

As of October 29, 2008, the Market offered 167 applications, the vast majority of which were categorized as tools or games. Of those apps, roughly a quarter garner the lion's share of the downloads.

So what types of apps are Android users downloading? Turns out the most popular Android apps, so far, are very similar to those that tend to lead the iPhone market: entertainment and reference.

Pac-Man and the Weather Channel lead all apps. Ringdroid - an app that allows users to record and edit sounds - and iPhone-favorite Shazam - an app that can "listen" to a song and help users identify the name and artist - are also among the top downloads. Yes, there's also a flashlight app.

How does Android Market traffic compare with the Apple App Store? At this point, it's difficult to tell. Based on the initial metrics, VentureBeat offers estimates that the Android Market downloads may reach "58 million after 100 days." For comparison, the Apple App Store reached 100 million downloads in 60 days.

While the Android Market numbers aren't earth shattering or record breaking, they are respectable. Given the current trends, the number of downloads should climb steadily, as should the number of applications available for download.

We're sure to see more and more happening with the Market and the handset it supports - even though Google is currently in the position of following a path established by Apple. Lest we forget, this isn't the first market Google has entered in this position. And they seem to have done fairly well for themselves in those markets. Will Android prove to be a similar win? That remains to be seen.