Microsoft  and eBay score unexpectedly high marks with developers, according to Evans.

You decide, the  report can be found here.   But I can’t quite grasp what sort of survey panel they used that didn’t have Amazon, with AWS – arguably the most robust and uniquely used Web 2.0 service framework yet, and Facebook – with the highest profile and most accelerating and deftly used developer program in the short history of Web 2.0 in its Facebook Apps program, blowing everyone away.

But then I read Evans Data’s client list, revealing both eBay and Microsoft as customers.

John Andrews, president of Evans Data, shills for Microsoft here:

“Microsoft has much more experience in developer programs and it shows”

Now this has traditionally been true, heck my company was a Microsoft shop for years because of the quality of their developer programs in a sea of almost non-existing offerings from the players of the day (Sun, Oracle, IBM, and the like).  But today?  I think that putting up MSN widgets against Facebook and Amazon just shows how little the offering is.  Google is an upstart and already commands high marks in this area, despite not being an Evans Data Advisory Panel member or client.

It would be pretty cool if someone wrote a Web 2.0 survey/rating system for Web 2.0 development programs.  I would trust the community at large more than a sample group programmed by a private analyst group that may very well be paid by the entities it is reviewing.

Internet security company SurfControl looked at the phenomenon and found that Australian workers who keep a close watch on their Facebook profile page were cumulatively costing their employers up to 5 billion Australian dollars ($4 billion) a year.

Hmmm. SurfControl “looked at the phenomenon.” Ok, let’s see – who is SurfControl?

From their website:

SurfControl Web filtering solutions enable companies to cost-effectively monitor network use and abuse anywhere in the organization, no matter how or where users connect to the Internet, across the full spectrum of Web-based content: IM, P2P, streaming media, file downloads, and Web-based e-mail.

So, a company who sells products that allow employers to filter internet content, comes up with a report that companies are losing $4 billion a year to Facebook. Slight conflict of interest here eh?

I could only imagine the economic boom we’d see if people stopped surfing Facebook! Just imagine all of the new products, inventions, cures for disease, and subsequent world peace that would occur if this menace was stopped! I am going to go out and buy SurfControl right now to get ahead of this as fast as I can.

In reality, social networks, websites, distractions, are always part of what workers have to contend with – information workers and otherwise. If employers think that Facebook (or SurfControl) is going to reap them many man-hours of productivity gains, they are likely the same employers whose employees waste time by surfing the web all day instead of contributing to the bottom line.

The problem was that in IE, if a parent frame has a different domain than the child page, the session data (stored in the Session object) is not preserved. This is a so-called “security feature.”

Anyway, if you have this problem, the answer is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323752

Simply put, in your ASP.NET page codebehind, add the following code:

 </p> <pre>   protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)<br />  {<br />      Response.AppendHeader("P3P", "CP=\"CAO PSA OUR\"");<br />      base.OnPreRender(e);<br />  }<br /></pre> <p>

This will add the right headers to every page.

Also cross-posted to the facebook developers wiki