10 August 2009

During a weekend message our Senior Pastor, Mark Beeson, explained that information on the web is Instant, Global and Permanent.

In this case, he is referring to the things you publish, post, submit, tweet, upload, etc.

But did you know that people could be watching you even before you make it public?

I found a good example of this today when working with a couple of our IT gurus - Jason Powell and Matt Metzger.

Jason sent us a link to userfly.com - a new tool that allows you to capture visitors movements on your site.

Matt plugged it into his blog to test it out and sure enough a person lands on the site, userfly memorizes their every movement up until they exit the site. From the userfly console you can watch a screencast of the person's screen, mouse movements and clicks.

Amazing!

But This Scenario Got Me Thinking
A user goes to your blog, and decides to leave a comment. As they are typing and revising the comment so it's appropriate, userfly is capturing the entire thing. When the user hits "publish," the final, polished comment is there for the world. But in fact, I could go back and see exactly what the user was about to say... :)

Scared yet? Should be. Chances are most website owners and bloggers are not monitoring their websites with this level of detail. But it should scare you just to know that the technology is available. Who knows what is being recorded on the web. Just like the millions of video cameras in the world today capturing things we're unaware of, so too on the web, the cameras are rolling.

Listen up Kiddo's, we aren't in Kansas anymore...