I don’t mean to call you an authoritarian fascist, but your suggestion gives me that impression. If I’m offending you, please say so and I’ll apologize. If a company actually did that, I doubt they’d last very long. I mean, if you’re fired from a company because you spent 15 minutes on Youtube while at work, I doubt other companies would blacklist you. It’s only a problem if like 40% of your time is spent on there.

Besides that, I don’t use Facebook and Youtube that much. So I’m “meh, could be worse” on all these rules anyway.

- I have personally witnessed logs of internet activity at my work where we can easily track the internet usage of any particular work computer. In various occasions we saw “spurges” of facebook.com, myspace, etc. (and other “networking” sites use) on computers where only one person uses that particular computer. The sad thing is, that charting the amount of time spent on those sites, we could easily see that over 90% spent more than 3/4 (and even MORE) of their alloted “work” time on those sites. Would you have your employees make use of the technology to suit their personal tastes and misuse of time, or to advance your work environment with productive employees, readily available for your customers calling on the phone (the later ringing all the time while employees paid to answer have their attention “fixed” on the computer browsing social sites.) What would you do?

- Use of such sites to harass, intimidate and otherwise “follow” the actions of work partners; and a plethora of other social misconduct. In a school setting I saw evidence of many employees of the school exchanging personal photos taken at the beach of students of that school who uploaded them to the site, re-sending the photos thru the school’s email with subjects like: Hunk collection, take your pick. I believe it is VERY morally questionable that employees feel they have the liberty of doing such endeavors. Even with a written policy, who can control the actions of such “bad seed” employees?

- Getting information from someone on FB, Myspace, etc. is just restricted to how much information that person gives about his personal life. It has NOT happened yet, but what if a stalker, serial killer, or someone with ulterior motives uses those networks as their “tool” to profile potential victims? Is there something these networks are doing to avoid/limit this potential use of their networks? None that I know of.

Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.”
Yes, it does connect people around the world. Yes, it does provide networking opportunities. The thing is, everyone uses facebook for different reasons. Do you remember when Facebook started? Yeah, it required a college email. It gave college students across the world the chance to connect with old friends or even make new ones. Yes, this was the networking/social strength that gave Facebook the edge over any other social-networking sites. Of course, this was one thing that appealed to so many people at the time; it gave college students their own networking system. Myspace couldn’t do that, but Facebook opened their doors to the rest of the world and with it came the downfall of the sites’ original intentions.
Yes, there might be a small percentage of people that use Facebook as a networking tool to further their careers but a majority use it for the following reasons:
-Check one of their useless apps like honesty box or to feed their imaginary internet pet
-Check to see if that stranger returned your un-welcomed “poke”
-Look up photos of friends. Yes, it is very nice to see how friends are doing. Do it on your own time, not the company’s time.
-Leave a comment on friends’ photos
-Write on someone’s wall.
-Just to check your profile to see if anything has changed within the last 5 minutes.
-Look up random people and add them because they are “cute” or have “a hot profile picture.” While it would be networking if you actually talked to the person it is stalking when you just look at their pictures, you creeper.
The list of useless time wasting things could go on-and-on, just like the list of applications and groups. Facebook might have been an acceptable networking tool 5 years ago but it is not anymore. Employers should not have to pay people because the employee wants to sit on the computer and look at peoples’ pictures instead of working and doing what they’re being paid to do.

I also think cameras should then be installed to document what happens, as I think we have all forgotten how we wasted time before the internet came along.

You don’t block those because you trust your employees to use them productively

How can any employee use YouTube productively? And if you think the majority of people are using Facebook in a way that benefits their company then I think you’re wrong.

They use it to chat to friends and to idle time away - not to improve their work.

Seriously, it’s 99% fluff and crap and while some people might use it to arrange a meeting or something the majority certainly do not.

In fact most email and most of what is on the Internet is irrelevant, why not block those too?

You don’t block those because you trust your employees to use them productively. Why should FaceBook be any different?

If I block Facebook it means I want my employees, the ones I pay, to do whatever their work is and not fanny around on some website that’s little more than a toy.

@Twenty - from a HR perspective, the message you are sending out to potential employees when you block FaceBook is:
New trends = taboo at our company (we fear change)
We don’t like the Internet
We don’t trust you

From a sales perspective, people put lots of personal info into their FaceBook profile - this, properly used by sales staff should greatly increase the chance of landing sales!

Turn it around (if you want to be that paranoid employer) and if all your employees are on FaceBook, what better way to get to know them then by reading their FaceBook profiles!

Btw LifeHacker has a post you might be interested in listing productivity apps in FaceBook so you could, in fact, use it to make your staff more productive!

I fail to see how ‘Mary Smith is happy about the sunny day’ and sending each other crappy invitations to stupid groups or applications which turn you into a zombie are any use to any employer. That’s about the extent of Facebook’s usefulness.

I’d restrict access to it in a flash. It’s a time waster, nothing more. In fact, I’d fire any employee I found using it. They should do it on their own time, not company time.