It's easy to believe that in the UK 6.5 billion pounds is possibly lost in employee productivity to social networking sites like Facebook (according to a story on MyDL this week).

While I'm not totally sure the research is accurate because a lot of these kinds of studies are conducted by companies that sell systems to block said websites, and scare tactics work for sales, I need only look at a former colleague's facebooking habits to see how easily precious company time can be wasted away in cyberspace. 

Facebook has to be one of the major buzz words of 2007 and not more so for one certain individual- we will call him Dave. Picture Dave. He has just turned thirty. He has, until recently been living with his mom and his last girlfriend was in primary school. 

Dave likes to think that he is cooler than he is, but cool is never a word used to describe him. 

Enter Facebook, a wonderful tool to connect with the girls who broke his heart in years prior and to scan the depths of cyber space for hot chicks he can randomly message. He spends whole days on Facebook, looking at pictures of pretty girls and sending them corny one liners. Dave is the king of the corny one liner you see. 

But less about Dave's ickiness and more about his Facebook habits. Shortly after the Facebook craze hit our office, there was talk of it being banned in our company. Dave was crushed. The following week, Dave's worst nightmare became reality. The IT department had banned Facebook, mostly because of bandwidth concerns, but access was allowed for one hour in the morning and one hour after work. Dave took to arriving early and going home late. He looked like the model employee. But alas, even this glimmer of hope was soon to fade and Facebook was permanently banned-unless one could prove one used it for work purposes. 

Dave was the first to be unbanned- having added several work related contacts as friends and creating a group which related to his actual job.

So while most people in the organisation have either lost interest, or just never got Facebook access, Dave has been happily wasting away the hours. Facebook is continually open on his computer and while he may not always be using it, I can at any time, check my "online friends" and Dave's smiling face will be in that list. 

At one stage he complained he had too much work. Work was taken away from him, and happily, Dave's Facebooking could continue. 

Dave is not alone though- a quick search of keywords in the Facebook search thingie reveals hundreds of groups named along the lines of the following "Facebook rehab society", "I am completely addicted to Facebook", "Facebook cuts my productivity to about 23%" and my personal favourite (parental guidance advised here) "Fuck you work, I'm Facebooking". 

Facebook's complete membership is hard to pin down, but some November 2007 figures indicate it to have been around 55 million members then. Provided half of these are of working age- that's around 27.5 million (we'll call it 28 for the sake of being brief) and another half of these spend half an hour on the site each day- we are talking about 7 million global manhours lost each day. (Please note, these are my own guestimations and are by no means even vaguely accurate!) 

Some companies and individuals and"experts" will say Facebook is useful and increases productivity because a happy individual is a productive individual-yada yada yada. This may be true, some companies even use Facebook for their own marketing, which is all very well. 

But productivity is not the only worry with such sites (and its not just Facebook, its myspace, its Bebo, its Youtube and a host of new ones that mushroom up every week)- its bandwidth. I'm no tecchie- but I know what bandwidth is, and I know how posted videos on a funwal,l and constant watching of Youtube videos, of Britney Spears' admission into hospital under armed guard, can eat at that bandwidth. 

Facebook wouldnt be so bad if it wasnt for those god-awful applications on some people's pages. Again, I refer to someone in my own friends list. We will call her Roxanne (after the prozzie in the song) because essentially she is an application whore. Of the 249 application requests I have received and denied recently, 89 of those were from our girl Roxie. A count of her actual applications, puts her at around the 125 mark. That's a lot of bandwidth being wasted on such gems as "what sex toy are you?" the "carpool" and "orgasmic" applications, the "bathroom wall" and several valentine's day applications (around seven or eight!) Her profile takes a full minute and a half to download on my pretty fast chinese ADSL connection. Yes, I counted! 

There are literally thousands of these crappy, useless applications being run on precious, company bandwidth. Another search of applications using some of the most common search words known to man- sex, money, God, and love- yields nearly a thousand apps. It may be more because when there are over 500 (as was the case for the word Love), it is just written as 500+ 

I am not anti-Facebook. I use it. I am not pro-Facebook either, I often wonder how many of my "friends" would actually know what I looked like now if it weren't for my profile picture. I just think its over-rated and over-used and in a lot of cases- over-abused.

Source:- http://www.mydigitallife.co.za