Mixing IT

But whether social networking - be it via instant messaging (IM), Facebook or MySpace - is itself such a disruptive influence in the workplace to warrant this draconian response from the establishment remains highly debatable.

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I think it is. I blocked FaceBook and another of my clients a short while back. One bloke was always sitting at the office in the corner doing "something" on the internet. When I went to take a look, he would close down the browser and log off. After blocking FaceBook, I have been back to the clients office twice, and on both occasions, he was not at the office. All of a sudden, he was out seeing clients. These are the first two times that I have not seen him at the office.

I suppose it's a chicken and egg problems. Do the people behave this way because of the companies or the other way around.

"You can't forcibly shut employees out of instant and other Internet-powered chat services.

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Oh yes you can. Has the guy never heard of information leakage. Most of these IM clients allow you to upload and download files. It might not be a problem for smaller companies, but for large corporates you then loose control over what enters and leaves your company. They also offer very, if any, audit trail.

I agree with the previous poster - if users were given uncontrolled access to these sites they would sit all day surfing. And while half the company would be surfing FB/Myspace/Youtube the other half trying to do real work on other business sites and suffer. With bandwidth costs not cheap in SA unfortunately we can't have 2GB internet lines so some stuff needs to be blocked.

I agree. Facebook and Myspace are very addictive and do use up a lot of resources. Its not fair to everybody else who has to work while others sit with stars in their eyes on Facebook all day long.

Just think back to the days before Facebook. We all managed fine then. I think that Facebook serves no purpose in the grand scheme of things other than to appeal to those people who have nothing better to do than "social networking". Why is it that people now use Facebook to send messages to each other, when they wouldn't use email to do it.