A-space

When I was reading news online the other day, I came across an article about a way that the government is using a Web 2.0 tool. According to the article on CNN.com, government agencies like the CIA and FBI are going to begin using a social networking tool called A-Space. This is somewhat similar to Web 2.0 tools like Facebook and Myspace, although it's not being used to share party pictures and pointless applications. Instead, employees with several government agencies can share ideas and information with one another. The creators of A-space plan for it to be used among spy agents to share information about terrorists.

I think it's interesting that these government agencies will be using a program like this. It's just another example of the usage of Web 2.0. My only concern would be this being hacked into by an unauthorized user. However, the creators claim that they are building checks into the system to track who is able to access the content. As the article mentions,

"We're building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer said. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space."

Hopefully, A-space will make it easier for important information to be shared among government agencies.