Turns out even Joe Hewitt can’t tear himself away from misspelled status updates and Farmville. The well-known software engineer at Facebook had this to tweet today on his personal Twitter account: “Considering deleting all email, twitter, fb, browser wares from my Macs to make them strictly work machines, use iPad, iPhone for the rest.”
He later clarified his resolution: “I just mean social media in general. Obviously I keep parts of Facebook (News - Alert) open for work purposes, but I was referring to my recreational use of Facebook.”
Instead, Hewitt proposes to relegate all recreational social media activity to strictly iPad and iPhone devices – an interesting proposal given that Facebook still doesn’t have an iPad app. Nevertheless, Hewitt swears he won’t be abandoning social media anytime soon. “Is that even possible these days? :) I was just thinking about restricting email and social media use to my iPad.”
Yet Hewitt makes a good point. Studies indicate that workers who use Twitter and other social networking sites at work cost businesses $2 billion in USD or a hefty $5.5 million per day. And according to a recent study by managed security services company Network Box, workers visit Facebook from the workplace more than any other Internet site, including Google. The company examined 13 billion URLs used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 and found that 6.8 percent of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook, which is double the amount of business traffic that goes to Google and nearly triple the amount that Yahoo receives.
Network Box also found that Facebook consumes a significant portion of business bandwidth: 4.5 percent of all bandwidth. However, YouTube accounts for an eye-popping 10 percent of all business bandwidth used.
No wonder then that 4 out of 10 companies ban social media in the workplace, according to a survey conducted by security solutions provider nCircle. Something Hewitt certainly doesn’t have to worry about.
Edited by
Juliana Kenny
