There is also some half-baked information (”report”) rolling around online saying that facebook is a waste of employees time and costing employers billions of dollars. Let’s look a little closer here my friends.

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said. The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year…

Man this is amazing pr and marketing spin for a software company. Write a report, yell fire, and offer to sell water to put out the fire.

One last pearl of wisdom from SurfControl: “The site (facebook) has even replaced internal messaging systems and emails, themselves legendary guzzlers of work time, for communicating within offices”… Hmm email and IM are a waste of time? Wow, I never knew. I guess some people just need to write something about facebook and declare it a waste so they can pimp their web control product.

What they did not talk about is how facebook can actually make employees more efficient; streamline connections and communication, etc. Have they considered in their report how applications can actually increase efficiency? Have they considered how facebook is fast becoming the ultimate aggregation platform and how it can actually increase efficiency?

I remember the days when it was considered a waste of time to just be online at work. Some people always look for the negative spin, as it is a great way for them to sell more products. Whatever!

Technorati Tags: facebook, time waste, facebook report, web control, facebook news

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