This is my first post using the WordPress iPhone app. Probably my last!

Originally Posted by
Lisa Tesler
in Developers Conference

Tuesday, Jun.17.2008, 11:51 AM

Earlier today, Sam Daoud, Senior Product
Manager in eBay’s Trust & Safety team gave developers a very early
preview of where eBay is headed with user-generated content. This
includes text, widgets, and other content that buyers and sellers post
on eBay.

He outlined a few of the threats that can be posed by user-generated
content, what eBay plans to do to safeguard users, and how these
changes might affect your applications.

If your application creates templates, widgets, or other active
content in listing descriptions, we encourage you to monitor the eBay
Developers Program blog and newsletter for updates on this topic.

It’s an Industry-Wide Challenge: Today, eBay
provides very few restrictions on user-generated content. We let you
put JavaScript, Flash, HTML, and other active content directly in
listing descriptions. In fact, eBay is the only major site in our space
that allows unrestricted user-generated content today. Most major
e-commerce sites allow none, and social networking sites typically have
tight restrictions.

Sam shared that we like how buyers and sellers can benefit from your
slideshow widgets, merchandising functionality, sophisticated hit
counters, and other rich content. So, his team is looking at how to
enable developers to continue offering these features to eBay users.

The concern is that rich content can leave users vulnerable to
exploitation. We need to make sure that buyers and sellers feel that
eBay is a safe place to do business.

What’s Changing on eBay: In the short-term, we’re
moving listing descriptions to a different domain. Descriptions will be
displayed by using an iFrame within the View Item page. Our intent is
to ensure that user-generated content won’t have access to eBay site
content. We’re currently piloting this in US Motors, and we’ll be
releasing this change in the US and internationally later this summer.

In the longer-term, Sam’s team is working on how to eliminate
malicious user-generated content, while still enabling meaningful
functionality and style in listing descriptions.

The idea is to create a small program to allow developers to offer
great functionality for users, using Flash, JavaScript, and other rich
Internet technologies. The difference is that you won’t directly
include code in listing descriptions. Instead, listing descriptions
would include a set of tags that load rich content using vetted widgets
and initialize them with parameters that you specify.

Sam’s team is still working on the details of how this will work.
But here’s the basic idea: Suppose a widget provides a slideshow. You
could load the widget by referencing it, and then pass in various
parameters, such as speed, special effects, and the image URLs. Here’s
a theoretical example to give you a sense of the approach:

<widget id=”YourRichWidgetIDHere”>
<speed>slow</speed>
<effect>fade</effect>
<img>http://SellersFirstPicture</image>
<img>http://SellersSecondPicture</img>
<!– more parameters could go he –>
</widget>

Again, this is just a theoretical representation (not the actual tags). eBay is still working out the implementation details.

What This Means To You: Sam explained that these
changes are intended to create a safer ecosystem for everyone. These
changes are intended to improve the buyer experience and increase trust
on eBay. More trust on eBay leads to more transactions, which is better
for everyone.

For application developers, this creates opportunities for you to
help users transition their listings, build compliant templates, and
aid in building out a widget catalog on eBay.

So, the key changes are that you need to use safe markup in
listings, and use widgets for active content. Widgets created by
approved widget developers will go through a vetting process to make
sure they comply with eBay security standards. If approved, the widgets
will be available to eBay users.

When This Will Affect You: We understand that these
changes may be disruptive to some users and to developers. That’s why
we’re announcing these changes now. We want to give you time to give us
feedback and to plan how to adjust to the new requirements. We’ll
provide a timeline, guidelines for safe content, and more details about
the new vetting process later this summer.

Got Feedback? Sam and Amjad responded to a number
of thoughtful questions at the end of the session. Sam is very
interested in getting early feedback from our developer community. So,
today we have created a developer forum thread where you can post your
questions: Request for Feedback on eBay’s Plans for User Generated Content

Cisco Announces $10 Million Investment to Support

Job Creation and Economic Development in the Palestinian Territories

Commitment Aims to Encourage Investment in Palestinian Economy and Population

Ramallah, West Bank, 30 Jan. 2008:
Cisco today announced an investment of $10 million to seed a
sustainable model of job-creation and economic development in the
Palestinian Territories. The three-year investment, made
in cooperation with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud
Abbas, represents Cisco’s continued commitment toward building stronger and healthier global communities through strategic social investments.

“Education
and the Internet are the great equalizers and vital to a sustainable,
productive economy that increases the standard of living for all,”
commented Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers. “It’s a
core part of our culture to give back, but it’s also a core strategy of
what drives our success in the regions of the world where we do
business. We make all our business decisions
with 3-5 years in mind and given our strong business momentum in the
region, it’s only appropriate to make this investment into its economy
and its people.”

“One of our key priorities is to build a market economy in close cooperation with the private sector. We
commend Cisco for its commitment to helping us accomplish this goal,
and look forward to working together toward enhancing the social,
economic and education opportunities for the people of Palestine. This contribution, we hope, will help prosperity and peace in the region,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Key
aspects of the commitment include a multi-million dollar venture
capital investment targeted at high-potential small businesses
throughout the region, as well as the development of training
programmes for critical information communications technology (ICT)
skills. In the future, Cisco’s intention is to engage in
a multi-stakeholder collaboration to encourage further inward
investment into the Palestinian economy from local, regional and global
organizations.

Chambers
added, “As we execute against this commitment over the coming years,
our hope is also to create a catalyst of active engagement and a call
to action for others across the public and private sector to contribute
toward a diverse and sustainable economic model for the region.”

For more information on Cisco’s global development and corporate social responsibility initiatives, please visit http://www.cisco.com/web/about/citizenship.

About Cisco Systems
Cisco,
(NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms
how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about
Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com. Cisco equipment in the Middle East is supplied by Cisco Systems International BV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cisco Systems, Inc.

First, yes, there is a 15% off any one item from Babies “R” Us coupon here (exp. 1/13/08), so don’t navigate away. However the point here is to show how easy it is for anyone to bypass the 1 printout maximum imposed by Babies “R” Us coupons.

Quick disclaimer, I stumbled on this because I clicked on an email coupon that automatically navigated me to a new page and popped open the browsers print prompt. I wasn’t ready to print, so I canceled, and then when I was ready to print it didn’t allow to. That is not right, bad user experience, and even a worst technical implementation.

Here is the email message:

Here is the actual coupon (don’t attempt to print this, store will not accept it, keep reading):

Here is the error you get on each subsequent attempt to open the coupon page:

Now here is how to bypass this stupid restriction:

If you are an uber geek, just disable cookies in your browser and then click on the link in the email message to open the coupon page. You can easily disable/enable cookies by using the Web Developer extension for Firefox or via the privacy options in your browser. Alternatively you can search for and delete the “toysrus.com” cookies stored on your machine. The later approach is not as neat since you will have to repeat the process every time you visit the coupon page.

If you are not so savvy and need step by step instructions, here it goes:

1- In your Firefox browser (if you don’t have one, go get it then come back) Click on Tools –> Options
2- Then navigate to the Privacy settings and find the Cookies sub section and click the Show Cookies button
3- A new window titled Cookies should open with a search bar on top.
4- In the search bar type “toysrus” in order to find all the Toys R Us (AKA Babies R Us) Cookies
5- Select all the cookies that appear then click the Remove Cookie button. Don’t worry this will not break anything.

Congratulations, you just made your browser forget that it ever visited the coupon website and you can go back and print your coupon. Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you want to revisit the coupon site to print more coupons.

If you are too lazy or don’t want to do all the above or if you are only here to scrounge for free coupons, then click the following link to use my coupon.

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Looks like Macy’s did not anticipate all the online shoppers on this post Christmas day. The site is down and displaying a “friendly” message. Shopping online is not always easier.

Technorati Tags: macy’s, online, shopping, down, traffic