I guess it is pretty hard to find anyone online who has somehow managed to avoid all the tips and advice regarding how unreliable Wikipedia can be if you use it for any study or work-related purposes. We’ve even heard doctors specifically claiming that Wikipedia should not be used for health-related research because it can be very harmful.

But I guess no one will dare to deny the fact that Wikipedia is actually one of the most useful things that exist online - simply because even if you can’t trust the user generated content of the human-edited encyclopedia 100%, you can at least get the basic understanding of any subject you may be interested in. And this basic understanding will be enough for further in-depth research using some of the more reliable resources.

This understanding of Wikipedia value and usefulness is probably one of the reasons for a very moderate amount of critical voices when it comes to Wikimedia fundraising efforts - people tend to agree that it is better to keep Wikipedia ad-free and independent by helping it with donations (small from private users and huge from some corporations).

Also it is probably the reason for the attention that Wikimedia fundraising efforts generate in the blogosphere every year and for the enthusiasm with which that we report every new million dollars raised. Yes, we do enjoy watching the progress bar moving forward and love this evidence of how something can actually be crowd-powered - knowledge same as the mere existence of the giant encyclopedia.

But still some people can’t help but have some doubts regarding the overall idea of fundraising and some specific actions in the process. One question that seems to be disturbing already is the scale of this year’s fundraising campaign that will feature the largest banner of all ever used for the purpose.

The thing is that I have just seen one of the Russian developers of the MediaWiki platform and administrator of the Russian Wikipedia version express his concerns (in Russian) regarding the size of the banner that will be used for the fundraising efforts this year - and the content as well. The creative as well as the designs of the pages that will be used for the fundraising campaign are available for everyone to take a look at here (the images are copyright-protected so I will refrain from using them here just in case - though you can easily click through and see everything for yourself).

The wiki page also mentions the campaign is scheduled to be launched on the 2^nd of November but since I can’t see the banner on Wikipedia now, my guess is that the campaign has been delayed for some reason but will probably go live any time soon.

So the concerns of the engineer I am referring to here are about the evolution of the fundraising banner: it began with one line, transformed to a frame, and then turned into a real pretty large and very noticeable banner. This year’s creative makes it clear that the recession has probably affected Wikimedia pretty hard given that the banner looks like it will be impossible to keep your eyes off the banner (and on the page content) at all.

But the banner size is not even the worst part about the campaign: the content of the banners is fully capitalized so to anyone who’s been online long enough it looks like Wikimedia team is shouting something at everyone visiting the site - like demanding to donate something. The company that created the content claimed that (quoting) “all caps will be fine” when asked about how reasonable this capitalization will be.

Now let me get this straight: I have no objections against Wikimedia fundraising campaigns (and I will likely donate something of my own as I think it will only be fair given how frequently I consult Wikipedia for some things). I actually think that the reasoning for Wikipedia to stay independent and ad-free is quite logical as well.

What’s more, as a long-term ad blocking antagonist I am quite comfortable with all types of banners - including the largest banners of all. But my relatively long time online has taught me not to shout at people with Caps Lock on and to dislike people shouting at me in this manner. And it somehow feels uncomfortable for me to think that Wikipedia will be shouting at users this year demanding the donations - even if their agency thinks all caps will be fine.

But the problem with our enthusiastic reports is that in the vast majority of situations the authorities (or their employees) have no idea about proper behavior online, netiquette or any guidelines they should follow not to do anything that will hurt instead of helping them provide better service. And some of the examples of their online activities are definitely more than simply clumsy.

The latest example was widely covered on Russian TV recently and the entire situation is pretty much hilarious. The story is about the Russian Bailiff Service. They have never had too much free time on their hands given that so many ex-husbands were trying to avoid paying alimony to their children. At the recession the situation got even worse with the growing number of debts for mortgages and various consumer loans so the agency now has even more work than ever.

So it is no wonder that they are looking for some new ways to collect the debts - and implement creativity in the process. One of the employees of the local service in one of the Russian towns has recently come up with an interesting idea: he suggested that the service should use one of the most popular social networks in Russia to track debtors down and make them pay.

This plan might sound just fine but up to one point: they have decided to use a photo of an attractive young girl for her to initiate friendships with the debtors when they had profiles on the social network and invite them to meet personally. Unfortunately the debtor was met by the bailiffs at the imaginary date instead of the girl they expected to meet.

And while this may sound like a pretty clever plan (and the bailiffs claim it helped them recover some debts that were very difficult to work on otherwise), the process actually involved two huge errors - and both of them will now bring the service to court as a defendant themselves.

The first and the worst problem is that the bailiffs decided that they could easily take a photo of any attractive girl right on the social network - and use the photo to build a profile they were supposed to use to persuade the debtors into imaginary relations. And they randomly selected a girl from Moscow without asking for her permission or anything - having somehow decided that the fact that she uploaded her photo online made the photo absolutely free to use for anyone without any permission.

Another error is that they did not even bother to consult the ToS of the social network Odnoklassniki.ru that served as a platform for their debt recovery campaign: unfortunately the document clearly specifies that it is not permitted to use a photo of another person without permission at all.

But the most hilarious part of the story is that the employees of the agency have actually decided that their idea deserved attention from everyone in the country so they invited TV reporters and told their story to demonstrate how wisely internet can be used by the authorities. Unfortunately for them, the girl whose photo they used (as well as her friends, family, and customers) happened to watch TV news as well - so she was very surprised to find out her photo was used in such a manner without her granting any permission at all.

Now she is planning to sue the bailiff service of the town in question and request compensation from them - and at least expects some kind of apologies from the service. Time will tell if she wins: judging by the fact that her position is supported by law chances are high she will though the problem is it must be problematic to win in court against a court-related service. But anyway the lesson is pretty clear here: internet is quite a tricky field and if you are venturing something new, at least don’t forget to consult your lawyers not to get into troubles.

Via (in Russian)

But the number of such people is definitely very limited while the number of bosses who are unhappy about their employees accessing social networks is impressive: according to the latest survey, as many as 90% of all the managers in the UK want social networks to be banned - or at least access to the websites should be restricted. Here is the distribution of opinions on what should be done with access to social networking websites on the workplace:

The survey was carried out by Bloxx, the company that specializes in web content filtering - so the interest in social networking in the office is pretty obvious. But I guess no matter who initiates a similar survey (even Facebook itself), it will be pretty difficult to prove social networking at the workplace does not influence the three major aspects that managers are concerned about: productivity, security, and company reputation. Bandwidth was another concern though it is not really too much of an issue for companies with unlimited bandwidth plans.

The interesting fact is that while IT managers realize that their employees do spend some extra time on social networking websites, not many companies actually have any procedures in place that could prevent such things. For example, 35% of all IT managers believe that employees of their companies spend more than 30 minutes daily on social networks without any proper work-related reasons. And while this may not sound like too much time, it also means that a company that does not do anything about it (over 22% of all the respondents), provides employees with extra 16 days of paid vacations annually which is pretty impressive if you think of it.

Of course it is obvious that there are some categories of users that should be granted access to social networks for some work-related purposes with dedicated policies in place for everyone to follow and observe. But all in all, I don’t really think it’s fair to socialize on your employer’s time if the employer does not expect you to work extra unpaid hours on your personal time - which could probably be something of an excuse.

What’s more, even Microsoft now seems to be ashamed of Vista - ashamed enough to lose some part of its revenue by providing free upgrades to Windows 7 to many of those who have recently purchased a laptop with an OEM version of Vista, kind of to compensate for the fact that you have to buy the worst operating system that ever existed only because you need to buy a new laptop for some reason.

My current laptop was only purchased a week before I was supposed to purchase it for my operating system to be eligible for such an upgrade - and this single week makes it impossible for me to upgrade free of charge now that this option is available to many of those laptop users that purchased their machines a week (and more) later than I did.

But you know what? I definitely have no desire to upgrade anyway - free of charge or not - for a number of important reasons. One of them is my own laziness and unwillingness to deal with all the hassle involved in making all the backups and installing everything from scratch and importing everything back. Last time I did it I spent two whole days only copying and exporting/importing everything and I certainly don’t want to go through the entire process again only a few months later.

But no matter how lazy I may be, if I have a goal that is worth fighting against the laziness, I will certainly fight and in most cases will win - depending on how badly I need to achieve that goal. And in this particular case I will have to admit it: I am quite fine with Vista and I will not upgrade until I buy my next laptop that will probably come with an OEM version of Windows 7.

I know that it is a definite nonsense for a tech blogger to use Windows at all as geeks are certainly Mac people but I have never managed to persuade myself into such a radical change after using Microsoft operating systems since it was Windows NT that my mother’s friend installed on my very first Pentium machine (it was 386) using a pack of floppy drives many years ago. I developed my computer knowledge simultaneously with Microsoft developing and releasing new versions of its operating systems and I have learned to feel myself an integral part of Microsoft environment whenever I was buying and using a new Windows-based machine.

But now that I have admitted that I am quite comfortable with Microsoft operating systems, I’ll have to make one final confession: I am rather happy with Vista. Honestly, this is my second Vista-based computer and while the previous one was on Home Premium edition, this one is packed with Vista Business and I have never felt uncomfortable with the operating system for any single reason.

As a long-time Windows user I have never had problems configuring the elements I needed to configure or removing the gadgets that I did not want to have on my desktop. But the good part is that Vista actually works pretty well where everyone else failed for me.

The recent example is some huge hassle with my multifunction device in my home office. The device comes from HP and used to work pretty well after I downloaded and installed a ton of drivers and some software that was supposed to facilitate my work with the device. It worked pretty well for a while but then at some point for no apparent reason I faced a problem with printer glitches when printing letters of Cyrillic alphabet and with scanner unwilling to save scanned documents at all. No uninstall and reinstall of the drivers and software helped at all so while thinking of the alternatives I decided to go with a built-in Vista alternative - the Windows Fax and Scan component. I definitely did not expect it would really help but it did and the process was actually more user-friendly than the HP software provided me with so I have simply decided to forget I had some special software installed for the device - and I now use the tools that I have anyway which are pretty good and do the job well.

Of course this is only one single example but the general idea is that if you have been a Microsoft user for a while, I strongly doubt you will have some grave problems with navigation or usability of Vista and all of its components. I know that Vista is blamed for many things but since I have not felt any bad affects myself, I will only have to repeat it: I see nothing wrong about using Vista and I really am not sorry about the fact I won’t be able to upgrade to Windows 7 free of charge even if Windows 7 is better - it will simply come to my computer life at some later point.

So of course Windows 7 may be better but it does not necessarily mean that Vista is ugly and entirely unusable. And finally, if not for an occasional Vista glitch that would prevent me from working normally for a couple of hours (I’m quite sure you have not seen a Microsoft products that is totally glitch-free), where would I get the adrenalin in my overall streamlined techy work?

But who exactly determines when an app is actually mature enough? Should there be some standards for the criteria that make an application eligible for no-beta logo? Should it be the number of users or some solid revenue stream or what? Of course there should not really be any common criteria because the status of your application only demonstrates how you feel about it and if you consider it to be mature enough to be actually used by people - and if you remove “beta” from you logo, you demonstrate that you are prepared to be responsible for all the glitches and problems your users could encounter in the process.

The team from Remember The Milk describes their initial idea of graduating from beta when they would actually be “done” but as time passed and they developed more and more new features, it quickly became apparent that they would never actually be “done” with the development. After all, if you happen to run a web application, you probably know that it is not difficult to create an endless road map while it’s way more difficult to code everything that you already have on that very road map.

So the decision is made and Remember The Milk, one of the leading applications in its field, is finally out of beta after 4 years of experiments. Of course the team now sees tons of people congratulating them on the decision on Twitter (and probably everywhere else where the team can be reached) but I have a few questions that are somewhat disturbing.

First of all, I’d really want to know if anything will change in the performance of the application now that it is the stable release free of the beta tag? I suspect nothing will really change and everything will be running as smoothly as it used to do and new features will be deployed when they are ready - beta or not any software needs to be updated.

I guess that the most important thing about being in “beta” versus being out of beta is how you treat your users and how reliable you consider your service to be. Basically if your product is tagged with beta, you kind of demonstrate that people should not really fully trust you because who knows what could happen to your service one day - even if you are Gmail. But did graduation from beta help Google avoid the recent cases of Gmail downtime? It certainly did not and nothing probably changed anyway.

So the conclusion here is that people trust a product based on a ton of factors with the most important ones being how reliable the service is and what kind of reputation it has - and in the world of betas everywhere people hardly pay attention to this particular sign at all.

What’s more, I have a feeling that people who hold premium accounts for Remember The Milk trusted the service enough to pay for it and the fact that the logo does not bear any beta now will hardly change their attitude and they will continue paying for their subscriptions provided that they are still happy with the functionality and the level of service - and not because it is a stable release now.

So I have to tell that I don’t expect any changes for Remember The Milk - or any other startup that follows their example. Yet seeing RTM making the decision to me looks a little like the web is finally ready to turn into an adult from a teen. In the early web 2.0 years everyone could easily cover all the mistakes with a “beta” tag and keep claiming the application is in beta so you should not really expect it to be 100% glitch-free - and now the decisions like this one make me think the web has matured and we should expect it to be more reliable now with web developers finally prepared to take responsibility for their creations which is definitely a good sign.

Unfortunately sometimes even the most advanced and knowledgeable corporations make social media mistakes and demonstrate how miserable an action online can be if done wrong. The recent example is Nokia deciding to close its Russian-language community in LiveJournal.

Both brands - Nokia and LaviJournal - are widely popular here and I’d call both household brands that absolutely everyone knows and a large portion of the population uses. Nokia products are advertised heavily in Russia and the country is a huge market for the cell phone manufacturer with tons of loyal users.

So it is no wonder that Nokia is trying to speak to the users here actively exactly where the users are - and the users are mostly on LiveJournal which is the most popular blog platform here and the time waster of choice for many. LiveJournal communities (multi-author blogs) serve as a popular tool for companies and brands to engage people in discussion offering the functionality of submitting posts to everyone with enough rights to do so. And this is exactly what Nokia has decided to establish here as well.

But instead of relying on some internal social media specialists, Nokia has decided to contract a local gadget blog and its team that claimed professional knowledge of the target audience and the peculiarities of communications in LiveJournal. Quite a light style was also chosen for community moderation - any LiveJournal user could join the community and post to it but posts were moderated before actually appearing in the community.

But unfortunately for everyone (Nokia, the editorial team, and the overall corporate usage of social media) the community only existed for 25 days and was closed last week with the PR representative citing the fact that many bloggers used the community in a manner the company did not predict it could be used in. The decision is obviously based on the fact that the feedback the company received via the posts, comments, and emails happened to mismatch the ideal image of the feedback the company was supposed to receive through its deep involvement in social media.

As the reason of the failure many quote the fact that Nokia community was launched, managed and moderated by an external team and many subscribers accused the team of unprofessional behavior, including directly comparing Nokia products with competitors which was against the guidelines issued by the company. Also many users complained that after hiring independent experts to run the community, Nokia itself was not particularly active in the community and people only rarely heard official comments to questions when asked.

Another problem was that one of the local mobile market experts decided to launch a competing community around Nokia products (on LiveJournal as well, obviously) and quickly received more subscribers than the official community managed to draw in. In fact, that was not really difficult as the community had only 243 members and was subscribed to by 295 people only (many of them were at the same time community members).

Now that the decision to close the community has been made after numerous fights around it, the discussions in the blogosphere are still very active and all the participants keep accusing each other of unprofessionalism and childish behavior where Nokia wanted some real work on a platform the company did not know how to handle.

At that Nokia promises that this move will not mean an end of the overall presence of the company in the Russian internet segment: the plan is to continue building online presence of Nokia elsewhere. So instead of trying to manage a community of its own Nokia has decided to work actively in independent communities and blogs that are related to the company’s products.

To me this sounds like a reasonable decision given that the official community has never had enough time to grow enough to be noticeable and the corporation did not seem to take it seriously enough to deal with it properly. Also it looks like a good lesson to every company hoping to build some kind of social media presence: if you know how to do it right - go for it, but if your knowledge is limited and you can’t rely on experts with 100% proven reputation (and I doubt the fairly new world of social media has many such 100% proven experts), chances are you will face a failure and the investments in social media will lead nowhere.

Via (in Russian)

I myself have a few observations regarding what a background may mean on Twitter. For example, a default background or one of the standard themes is often an indication of a spammer or yet another faceless account that will try to sell me something. A background that contains a very happy smiling photo of the user along with all the contact details usually demonstrates an independent marketing or consulting professional who relies on Twitter heavily to drive sales - hence the aggressive background.

I myself have chosen quite a neutral photo of some flowers on the keyboard of my laptop - simply because I liked the photo and it combined the two things that I like: technology and nature. In fact, I never visit my own Twitter page as I rely on Twhirl for all my Twitter-related activities and only visit pages of those people who follow me or say something particularly interesting so I want to see more of their updates in retrospect.

So I have had no idea what my own background actually looked like when people visited my profile - though to my surprise, my own background has changed significantly after I initially uploaded the photo (probably due to some changes in how image resolution is processed). But I’ll have to tell you that it will still probably stay this way because Twitter procedure of changing the backgrounds is not the most user-friendly one - so I am definitely too lazy to deal with it again.

But now I have found out that a dedicated application exists that is intended to make everything that is related to visual aspects of Twitter in your life much easier. The name is TwiBack and the application has two main features: you can upload multiple photos for backgrounds or profile pictures here and you can decide how such photos will rotate in your Twitter profile.

At that you can also decide on some individual settings for the background photos, including if the image should be tiled and if some background color should be selected additionally. You can even select your own time zone and the application will rotate photos exactly at the time you want it following the frequency specified.

As someone who constantly keeps asking about business models whenever I review a startup, I was totally surprised when I figured out that the application even has a monetization idea at place: they plan to serve as a marketplace where advertisers will pay to have their ads displayed as the backgrounds or profile pictures of Twitter users they choose among the application users. And while I have serious doubts about people looking at the backgrounds frequently, the profile pictures are a very reasonable platform for advertising given that these icons are actually delivered to everyone subscribed to the user-via the web interface or via some desktop or online client.

Same as many other useful applications, TwiBack was born out of a real need of its creators - a web design company from Latvia that had a corporate Twitter account and wanted to display the photos of employees on this page - with a new photo displayed every day. And since the only way to do this was to do it manually, they have decided to create an application to do just that.

This certainly proves that it’s hard to come up with an amazing idea out of nothing but if you have a need yourself, chances are there are people who have a very similar need and will use your application. And if the guys manage to bring advertisers here, this will be a very promising idea for quite a number of Twitter users looking to monetize their time and efforts dedicated to Twitter.

To me the deal definitely looks huge given that Microsoft has managed to get two very cool and hyped services while Google stays without all those precious real-time pieces of information that everyone should be crazy about. And of course Google must feel hurt about Bing doing something it can’t do. But now tell me does having such live updates in its search index make Bing more competitive versus Google? Is it really something that will make a good portion of the audience choose Bing over Google?

I really don’t want to spoil the celebration for everyone but I hope no one will doubt it very much if I share my concerns over the entire idea here. I don’t even want to mention the tiny things like tons of duplicate content on Twitter and Facebook - like those numerous retweets of interesting content combined with some users (like me) choosing to update their Facebook statuses right from Twitter - and further adding to the mess of duplicate content.

Of course there’s no denying to the fact that Twitter features plenty of useful information and can serve as an excellent tool for research whenever you need some fresh news - whatever the topic is. But is it equally true for Facebook as well? Are Facebook updates equally useful or will they only add to the noise? Unfortunately I have my doubts here.

I don’t know about you but even with the availability of various search engines and their accuracy it is still sometime difficult for me to find the content that will really truly serve my needs. As a result when I do some large-scale research for a consulting project or something, I normally use a complicated combination of search tools (frequently those that search within specific sites, including Facebook when I’m looking for groups or fan pages and Twitter when I’m looking for honest and fresh opinions from people).

I rarely face a situation where I actually can’t find something that I need - I will still find it but it is the matter of figuring out where to go to find it and how many pages of search results I should dive into. It already seems to me that the availability of information has probably reached the level where it is much more difficult to sort everything out and identify something that you want - and staying without search results at all is hardly something I can imagine.

So what will Bing now offer me? Sure, they want to add tons of updates from millions upon millions of Twitter and Facebook users - if Microsoft decides these updates are somehow relevant to my request. And you know what? To me this all sounds a little bit scary when I try to imagine that I’ll have something even more crowded when I need to find something quickly and without all those real-time updates.

And will Facebook updates really provide any value to the searchers? In fact, now that I look at my Facebook wall and see the updates from my friends, they definitely make tons of sense to me and actually look pretty useful. But there’s one factor that should be taken into account here: they are only useful to me because they come from my friends. And even if their updates are public, it does not mean that they are equally useful to other users. Of course it matters if a friend shares the news of buying a new house but will I need thousands of real estate agents from Facebook attacking me with their sales pitches if I am interested in one particular house purchased by one particular friend of mine?

Of course it is hard to judge until Facebook updates really go live on Bing and chances are it will be much better than my expectations currently are. But it will really be interesting to see how many people make their updates public on Facebook and what kind of updates these are - and if they add value to the overall news landscape same as Twitter updates do.

This decision is obviously good at least because I personally don’t like any limitations and opening yet another window to the huge Russian market is hopefully a wise decision for Amazon. But unfortunately there are some dubious things about this entire idea.

One such thing is that there will be virtually no Russian-language content on Kindle at all - as Amazon is planning to keep selling the same assortment of books and newspapers/magazines that are available to the users in the US. So this means that while Russian users will be able to consume all types of content for Kindle with the exception for blogs and some experimental services, the content will still be largely limited to people who want to read in the language that is not native to them.

And while the limitation regarding blogs is promised to be eliminated eventually, availability of Russian-language books on Kindle will mean cooperation with some local partner to provide the titles that will be appealing enough to buy for the Russian users as well - and I can imagine copyright issues will be a real nightmare so Amazon will probably try to stay away from them.

But anyway this approach means that Amazon is planning to target a tiny portion of the population of Russia - only those people who are willing to consume English-language content or foreigners living in Russia. But anyway this is a very small number of people though I expect buying a Kindle makes sense to people outside of Moscow where foreign-language books are rarely available at all - as they could want to buy Kindle to learn or polish their English.

But anyway the best part about the entire expansion idea is that Amazon is not increasing the price for international users versus those people in the US enjoy. So we’ll basically have to pay taxes and shipping price (which is pretty obvious and should be expected anyway) and get the device at the price that is comparable to the price for people in the US.

This is more than reasonable given that normally we in Russia expect much higher prices for electronics than those available to the people in the US or Europe. But the problem is that this price will hardly guarantee sales of Kindle here at all - it is just appealing that Amazon is willing to sell directly to local consumers without ridiculous price increases.

At the same time I myself suspect that the vast majority of the population of Russia has no idea what Kindle is at all and have never heard the name. What’s even worse, I have strong doubts that there are enough people here who would want to read their books or magazines electronically - let alone English-language titles.

The interesting part is that one of the leading local mobile carriers is reportedly negotiating (text in Russian) with Amazon an exclusive deal to sell 20 thousand e-readers in Russia annually. But unlike sending Kindle directly to Russian customers by mail, such an arrangement will make Amazon deal with all the difficulties related to interface and documentation translation into Russian as well as arrange for local support - and this is hardly something Amazon is very much willing to do.

And I myself really hope that Amazon will keep sending Kindles directly to Russia even if they do enter a deal with a local representative - simply because I know that any exclusive deal in Russia will mean unbelievably high prices that no one in their right mind will be willing to pay for a gadget like Kindle which is hardly a necessity.

But anyway I think that Amazon is doing everything right in general now that they are shipping Kindles to Russia - and adding Russian-language titles could be done later if they see enough demand from the local audience. And now that we see this arrangement, I can’t help but wonder if other manufacturers could be willing to follow with similar initiatives and we’ll see gadgets like iPhone or iPod Touch shipping to Russia at a price comparable to that for the US instead of many times higher. I hardly believe it could be possible but I will at least hope it could - simply because it feels better when you know international manufacturers are willing to consider you a normal customer instead of some odd international user.

Via (in Russian)

For those of you who are not aware of the notion of a SuperNode, this is the basis of peer to peer technology behind Skype: those Skype users with a good connection can turn into SuperNodes to provide traffic to other users of Skype who don’t happen to enjoy such an advantage. And the entire network works on some users making it possible for other users to chat and talk - and this is exactly what makes it possible for us to chat and talk for free.

The post that I’ve read today described exactly how a computer user can forbid Skype from using his or her computer as a SuperNode - and keep all the traffic to themselves. There are no configuration options in Skype itself that could allow users to decide if they want to act as a SuperNode or not: system registry needs to be edited in Windows to make the trick of forbidding Skype from using your computer as a SuperNode.

It is no wonder that numerous geeks that are subscribed to this blog have rushed to stop other users from using their traffic. But there were other voices that tried to persuade everyone that Skype itself is free - and so we should be generous enough to share some traffic with others to let the entire network work (especially since bandwidth usage of a SuperNode is told to be approximately 15 KBPS which is hardly too difficult to handle).

Of course it is obvious that people do have to pay for use of the free features of Skype (which are probably the most widely used ones, like free PC to PC calls) in some manner - be it a small portion of your bandwidth usage or the money that you regularly pay for premium services. But this is not what matters the most. To me the most important thing is how you let your users decide if they want to pay or not - and in what form.

I myself tend to think that no matter what you want your users to do, you should at least inform them of that or - better still - properly ask for their authorization to do so. And in this particular case I am not quite happy about Skype using my computer without my knowledge - even though I would have certainly let them do so anyway if they ever asked.

I guess the best example here is Panda cloud antivirus (many of my friends know that I am a huge fan of the app). Of course Panda is probably too simple for real geeks and those of my friends who claim Panda is too “girly” are right but I guess I am entitled to use a girly antivirus anyway given my own gender - especially since I’ve always found it a real pain to configure something in more complex antivirus solutions because I was afraid I would do something accidentally that will leave me unprotected.

This is what Panda cloud antivirus eliminates entirely as the number of settings available for the solution is so limited that you basically can do nothing wrong at all. Those of us who remember Panda launching their first of a kind cloud antivirus may remember their explanation of the free nature of the application: in exchange for letting us use the solution for free, they ask us to help them protect us (and their paying customers) better in the future by providing them with an opportunity of grabbing information on the new malware right from our computers.

Of course it may feel like something of a vulnerability to many but I certainly have more reasons not to trust Microsoft and their approach to computer security - and still I work with their software - so I decided it would not hurt helping Panda out. The interesting part is that I could have the antivirus for free even if I decided to close my computer to them so it was my free will to do what I choose - and I’ve made my choice.

Unfortunately this is not how Skype behaves. For example, I consider myself to be quite an advanced computer user as I probably know more about various apps running on my desktop and in my browser than an ordinary user. But still I was not aware about Skype ability to use some computers in the network as SuperNodes - simply because the information never crossed my attention zone. So I have a feeling that the vast majority of those millions upon millions of happy Skype users don’t realize this thing exists at all - and could be very surprised if someone on TV (Oprah?) chose to explain the idea to them.

And to some users there may be plenty of negative aspects in this approach as they don’t realize what is going on behind the scenes. It is quite obvious that such a behavior is even more dubious in countries where many users are still on limited bandwidth plans because even the tiny bandwidth usage by Skype may lead to extra expenses for users who will probably not want to face such expenses at all. And this means that Skype could actually be not free to such users - even without them realizing it and with Skype heavily advertising their totally free calls.

What I see as a perfectly fair arrangement for Skype is actually adding an option to let users decide themselves if they want to share their bandwidth with other users or not. Those who don’t want to, could face certain limitations (like only having a limited number of call minutes per month) or be offered premium accounts where they would need to pay some monthly fee or certain per-minute fee for their talks.

This could have let everyone decide if we are willing to pay with our money or with our traffic - and even if it could hardly increase Skype revenue significantly, it could at least be viewed as a fair arrangement and people would at least stop asking question about how phone calls could be free at all.

And I think every web service owner should always try to explain to their users that some price always exists when an application is free. Your users should understand how exactly they pay - by watching ads or sharing their bandwidth or whatever else it may be - because otherwise some of the more geeky users will eventually figure everything out and will start asking questions. And you will hardly want to answer such questions.