What are you talking about? Have you seen the numbers? Do you talk to people in the real world?

I am certainly not one of the FB junkies. And I resisted joining for many years (have had a .edu account for many years after graduating). But the sheer torrent of invites from my friends in the last 5 months - all in their 30s - is a testimonial to how quickly FB is growing as THE social platform.

I hate using a lot of it. I hate getting messages in my email that tell me that a friend has written to me on FB, logging in, clicking the Inbox tab, and then seeing the message. It could just have come in my original message as God intended it to!

But I can’t deny that it is the internet phenomena. And TC does it’s readers justice by giving it the coverage it does. So get used to it, or set up some RSS filter that lets you remove all FB news.

[TC] Now We’re Not Talking: Telstra Bans Facebook:
Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has banned its approximately 49,000 employees from using Facebook. As Cameron Reilly at G’Day World puts it, “This woul…

For example, writing a short status update and just communicating a thought to friends is just good for you and your work. Of course you don’t want employees wasting time, but outright banning a site like that is just lazy. There are other and much better ways to manage your staff and making sure they are actually doing the work.

As for banning hotmail or gmail, I sometimes need to use gmail since I have a lot of informal contacts there and part of the work gets easier when making use of that network.

By the way, my corporate employer has about 2-3% employees, more than a thousand, in it’s Facebook “network”. I hope that the more people get involved in a company’s network, the harder it will become to ban the site. Or maybe it’s the other way around..

Here’s a humorous bit of info to carry you into the weekend.
A communications giant by the name of Telstra, based in Australia, has put in place an internal ban on Facebook. That’s right. 49,000 people whose task it is to keep fellow Aussie…

All Internet should be banned if you are the owner and full access no monitoring if you are an employee

Vijay

Not, because I’m scared to lose my job (why would I) but it’s just a fishy feeling.

If an employee can perform and produce acceptable results, why not let him/her waste time on facebook?

“… any half-intelligent employer in the 21st century should be measuring their employees by their OUTPUT, not by what time they punch the clock or what they are doing each minute of the day.” — Cameron Reilly (http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/07/27/cams-world-27-july-2007)

Facebook much like Myspace is an as likely candidate to get a ban on the corporate network access as several German companies have banned Ebay Access from desks as well. If you need access to ebay for biz purposes, you will be reinstated but other than that, for most people this is at the moment about wasted time. And about legal liabilities.

Your employer does not pay you for surfing Facebook and keeping up with your friends. In most cases it is even to be seen how far private mail is allowed or useful.

Is this web 2,0ish shiny bright and fun? No, but still normal business in most places.

A clever company though would put this ban on but relief it at those standard lunch times, when the employer is free to do what he likes.