Lots of companies are conducting incredible useless investigations on the amount of time being wasted on social networks (check this by Nucleus research). These studies regularly claim that the use of Twitter, Facebook and other such services poses a threat to corporate wealth!!! Really? I think the biggest threat is them and whomever pays them to come out which such nonsense. Using social sites will be exactly like sending an email to a friend, or browse a newspaper, read news from a news portal, or buying something on Amazon, and so forth.

Thanks to companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, just to mention the three biggest ones, people have now access to communications devices and web applications which are far superior to those offered by their employers. The gap is even more striking for technologically savvy individuals.

In my opining companies would be far better off if they gave up blocking social networks. Social networks are here to stay, what is the point in fighting them? Lots of people have smart phones with unlimited internet connectivity, if they want to use social sites they simply use their phone. Others can simply by-pass the firewall if they know a little more about computers than the average folk.

I find it amazing that companies still use emails as their internal mean of communication. What about instant messaging? In some companies there is a culture of hoarding information rather than sharing it across all employees. Such hoarding leads to duplicate work, ignorance of what is available in another department which may be useful to yours, and ultimately lost profits.

Check out the special report on social networking by the economist.