Facebook at Work - Slacking or Networking?
Earlier this week a Sydney Morning Herald article claimed that Facebook "may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year." The quote is from an analytics firm called SurfControl, in a report which calculated "that if an employee spends …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after SurfControl's report claimed Facebook may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year — picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald under the "$5b waste of time" framing — Read/WriteWeb pushes back on the arithmetic-free panic and reframes the question: slacking or networking?
The rebuttal leans on facts from the same month: Facebook's base is aging to include users 35 and older, its May-launched f8 developer platform has become a Silicon Valley talking point, and it shipped an iPhone-tuned site and upgraded messaging within days of each other. That arc runs back to March's cautionary tale about an employee who spent half the workday on Facebook and then bragged about it — the productivity anxiety predates the numbers.
First-order effects
- Web-filtering vendors like SurfControl get ready-made marketing collateral: a headline dollar figure turns casual social-networking at work into a budget-line problem for Australian IT departments.
- Employers now face a concrete policy fork — block Facebook outright or tolerate it — just as its user base maturing past 35 makes legitimate professional networking part of the same traffic being counted as lost productivity.
Second-order effects
- Blanket bans become risky for companies whose staff use Facebook for recruiting, sales contacts, and industry connections, pushing firms toward acceptable-use policies rather than simple URL blocks.
- The measurement method itself — extrapolating idle hours into a $5 billion loss — invites competitors and analysts to challenge filtering vendors' productivity math, since the same technique could indict email or any web activity.
Third-order effects
- If workplace usage keeps growing alongside the older demographic, the slack-versus-network tension points toward a split between personal profiles and work-oriented social tools — an enterprise social-software category waiting to be built.
- Filter-vendor productivity estimates look set to become a recurring fixture in corporate IT debates, with the burden on platforms like Facebook to demonstrate business value rather than mere popularity.
The trend: Consumer social networks are entering the workplace faster than employers can classify them, forcing a choice between blocking traffic and building work-specific versions of the same tools.