Web Worker Daily

Trust is probably the most crucial factor in any working relationship — indeed, in any human relationship. It can be a challenge to engender trust in your colleagues at the best of times, but when you’re not on site with them, it’s even harder.

In a face-to-face working relationship, you may not be particularly conscious of the need to build trust, or the innate tactics you use to do so. But when you’re working remotely, it can be a good idea to give a little thought to trust, and to be conscious of it as you build your remote working experience. Here are what I see as the most effective and most straightforward ways to build trust remotely. Read the rest of this entry »

The news that Gmail went down this morning (UK time) got me thinking about how we increasingly rely on third parties for essential business services. With a proliferation of web apps offering to meet our every business need and the inexorable rise of cloud computing, are we investing too much trust in them?

Fortunately, I have Offline Gmail support enabled, which meant that I could at least continue working on emails received overnight while Gmail was down. But judging by the outpouring of angst on Twitter, many people had a pretty unproductive morning, with some four hours of downtime.

Gmail appears to be back up now, but you can bet that this won’t be the last time a major web app suffers downtime. While we can probably be reasonably confident that Google has the engineering talent to recover from most failures quite quickly (especially as Google’s paid-for Google For Domains users have a service-level agreement, including an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent), we’ve seen many services suffer from a lack of continued support and investment, and some that disappear altogether.

Are we putting too much faith in services that we have no control over? Do you have a backup plan in place in case a critical part of your workflow goes down?

Are you trustworthy?

This is something we have to ask ourselves as web workers.  In fact, our clients are probably asking us this very question through subtext, we just aren’t aware of it.  Important as this question may be, there is another question that should be considered:

Do you appear trustworthy?

Online credibility is especially important for us, since it’s likely that our online presence is the only thing potential customers will see.  In this increasingly searchable world, we need to use every means possible to establish that we are worthy of a client’s trust. Here are some ways in which we can do this:

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you know whether you can trust someone you’ve run across on the web – say, by finding them on Craigslist? That’s the question Divvs is setting out to answer. Currently in alpha, it takes a relatively simple approach to the problem: the more connected you are across multiple networks, the more trustworthy you are. The result is wrapped up in a single numerical “Divvs Rating.” When you sign up, you’re given the opportunity to identify yourself in multiple ways (currently email, mobile phone, Facebook, and Twitter). Each identity is verified (for example, you’ll get a text code to your phone number, to input back to the site), and the more identity juice you have, and the better connected you are, the higher your Divvs rating.

It’s an interesting idea, a sort of formalization of the common practice of Googling people. If it becomes popular, the Divvs rating could serve as a quick way to size up potential collaborators and subcontractors. Of course, if it becomes popular, spammers will also try to figure out how to scam it – but we’re a ways off from that point yet. At the moment, it’s at least a fun exercise in comparing your networking level to those of your peers.