At its core, the CB is simply a vessel that enables people to snap-in panels that look at the page you’re browsing in IE and return some hopefully useful information to you. The panels are really not much more than framed web pages that serve some specific purpose (tagging a site, enabling comments about a site, rating a site, etc). In this release, the CB is an Internet Explorer add-in that enables users to annotate, notes about and descriptively tag web sites they visit in IE. The bar enables sharing of opinions, tags, and help among all users of the bar and in no way modifies the visited page. The bar is envisioned as a way for people to asynchronously tag and comment on web pages and domains – in essence, to build a community around sites that is distinct from the site itself and enables interaction among people who visit the site from all over the world without having to have to be there at the same time.

Our vision is that third parties can create panels for the Community Bar. We’re trying to enable a whole new class of application: the display of contextually relevant stuff based on what web page the user is currently looking at.

For the community bar to work, the URL for each site you visit in Internet Explorer is sent to the servers that are hosting the panels. This is necessary so the panels can return some useful content to you. In other words, if you go to www.msnbc.com, the bar detects that and sends that URL to the server hosting the “Notes” component. The Notes component then looks to see if anyone has left messages about that URL and returns those messages to the Notes tile in the Community Bar. The Community Bar does the same thing for each tile that is open inside the Bar. This means, of course, that any server that hosts a tile, in essence, stores your Community Bar login’s* movement around the internet. Even if they don’t do it explicitly, your movement is ‘stored’ in the web server logs of the site. For the panels hosted by Microsoft, we aren’t going to do anything evil with that information. If anything, we may use it as statistically interesting data over in MSResearch (or maybe something else we haven’t imagined yet), but we aren’t going to sell it. For other panel hosters – we don’t really have control over what they will do with the info, but presumably if they do something bad with the log information, our forums will light up with it and you can stop using the panel.

* Note I said “Community Bar Login” instead of “your” – the CB doesn’t really know you – all it knows is that some being with a Community Bar login is surfing to a web site and it dutifully sends that web site’s address to a panel server.

Easy – close Community Bar (click the little X in the right hand corner of the pane). Or remove a particular panel if it bothers you (note that Community Bar will continue to send the URLs you visit to the panels that are still open). CB only sends the URLs to the panel servers if it is open.

Yep (except for https: and intranet requests). How else would they work? Sure, I suppose we could obfuscate the requests through a broker, but some server somewhere would still know a login visited a site, so the log would still be stored somewhere.

Of course you shouldn’t trust anything on the internet. But the Community Bar was written by a couple of guys in MSResearch as a thought-experiment, and was seen by a couple of other guys in Windows Server who thought it was a cool plug in to enable easier interaction with community services in IE. We (Matt, Robert, Robert and Stefan) aren’t nefarious and we aren’t trying to steal your identity. We all use these social software tools and we were looking for cool ways to make them easier to use and extend their functionality where possible, so Matt and Robert wrote CB for IE. We can envision us using the CB usage data for research into social networking, but we aren’t going to sell it or give it to anyone else in a way that would violate your trust. You should be aware, however, that some people who work for Microsoft at some time in the future may see the browsing patterns of the CB’s logins and may use these for some purpose that we can’t imagine yet. Again, though, we still don’t know who you are – we’d just know that some login accessed some page on the internet at some time.

Doubt it. This is a part-time dev effort by Robert and Matt. The other Robert and Stefan have lost their coding skills, so you are pretty much on your own.

You’re kidding, right? Again, four guys are behind this. Robert and Matt (devs and visionaries) and Robert and Stefan (we just found it and decided to package it with our site). We have been using it for a while and it seems like a well-behaved citizen (it even respects tabs in IE). If there are egregious problems, post them to the forums on www.theworkingnetwork.com – if we see lots of posts, we’ll try and fix it. Robert and Matt do have passion around this thing, so they’ll do their best, but this is NOT an officially supported product from MS. So if it really hoses your box, uninstall it. I think the legal folks are giving us language for our EULA which holds us harmless if it thrashes your box. We do want people to use this, and we are happy to get feedback on bugs and feature suggestions – we just can’t guarantee we’ll be able to get to them all!