The data found if one employee spent an hour a day of company time on Facebook, it could cost their employer more than $6200 a year.

Projected across the 800,000 businesses with one or more employees in Australia, this one wasted hour a day equaled productivity losses of more than $5 billion a year.

NineMSN, however is running an article discussing Facebook as a “vital tool for productivity“. Interestingly enough I returned to this article for information on Facebook as a time waster and found that it had been altered to this new standpoint.

Facebook is a “vital tool for productivity” for Australian businesses, a leading Internet authority says.

Ross Dawson says claims that websites such as Facebook are timewasters is irresponsible and contradicts actual business practice.

Ninemsn’s Money website is also on board with an article titled “The dangers of being too social” that discusses social networking sites again from the time wasting point of view.

These sites can also be a huge waste of time. According to comScore, people spend an average of 186 minutes on Facebook per session. (To be fair, a lot of those visitors are letting the program run in the background while they perform other tasks — but three hours is still a long time.)

Aside from the time-waster vs time-saver debate, there is also a rising issue of threat from hacker activities. A concern shared throughout these articles as the popularity and growth rate of the site makes it an attractive target for hackers and spam monkeys. I have already come across groups and members on Facebook who are spamtastic. It’s not uncommon now to see members with a profile that invites friends to come along and view their webcam site or sign up at another site to see more pictures of them. This is something that will only get worse and I do hope it is an issue that can be tackled before it is too late.

I am not totally sold on the “vital tool” argument but I do see how it can be beneficial as a tool for some companies and also as a tool for networking with others in your industry for sharing ideas and perhaps even finding employees.

Almost all of the team at my office are signed up and we have multiple groups ranging from professional work groups to party organising groups. I have found it to be time saving for organising social activities but from a business point of view my mind switches more so to thinking about the productivity lost for my team checking out their buddies photos and writing on their “super walls” - and also the large amount of bandwidth these sorts of sites seem to guzzle up. We’re not ready to ban the site yet (as many companies have started doing) but we have given a softly softly warning to staff and asked them to keep their “facebooking” to lunch hours.

I am sure we will see more articles of this nature popping up in the mainstream press in the coming months.

But why does this new practice fall under the realm of search marketers? And does it make sense? Most search marketers see it as a natural progression of services.

Check out the article to read about the progression as well as selling SMM & SMO related services to clients.

Two reports have been released by major big business think tanks in the last two weeks which serve as bookends to a growing debate over the future of enterprise IT and, by implication, Web 2.0. On one side is Forrester Research and their contention that CIOs will spurn Web 2.0 startups and let the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Google provide their ‘best of breed’ solutions. On the other side is The Leading Edge Forum and their multi-year study advising the enterprise to abandon intranets, live on the web and let IT and users cooperate in generating ‘best of breed’ solutions. It’s hard to imagine both sides can be right.

The lengthy article discusses the comparisons in detail and gives some great insight. Myself I feel more of a growing sensation (perhaps like spider senses?) that the web related I.T. industry is heading for another bubble burst. Looking around at salaries on offer for jobs, charges for different services and so on - from an insiders point of view I cannot see how such values can be maintained in the long haul. It might be glory days now - particularly here in Australia as industries such as search marketing and services such as SEO are becoming more widely known and as such are booming - however with new competition entering the market every day and clients becoming more aware of the work required it is my opinion that prices will inevitably come crashing down, and so too will salaries along with them.

Nevertheless check out the article here.

del.icio.us can be used in many ways. Those listed as examples on the site itself include;

• Research - Keep track of the sites you’ve used for researching a specific topic - this will make it easier to come back to them when it comes time to do your referencing.
• Wishlist - You can save pages from commerce sites to your wishlist on del.icio.us and then send people to http://del.icio.us/username/wishlist to feed them gift ideas.
• Podcasting - You can find or post podcasts using the mp3+podcast tag combination.
• Vacation Planning - Bookmark and tag all the sites you find whilst researching your holiday, or browse through to find sites others have found for the destination you wish to visit.
• Linklog - You can save bookmarks to interesting websites along with a bit of commentary. There are features on the site to help you posts these lists to your own blog.
• Cookbook - Bookmark recipes and tag them with the recipe’s ingredients or style of cooking.
• Collaboration - Create groups, specific tags or share an account with friends or colleagues.

From the site;

What can you do as a Digg user? Lots. Every person can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even Digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!

For more information check out the How Digg Works page.

The feature list is as follows;

• Aggregates all of your social networking presence into one interface.
• Lets you know exactly what is happening on all of your social network locations in real time
• Unique ranking algorithm that ranks your friends according to the level of interaction they have with you.
• Saves you the effort of constantly visiting all the social networks you regularly use. With 8hands you can access all your community locations from one single entry point.
• Chat via IM with all of your social networks friends.
• Organize all your social media files that are all around the net (your flickr pictures, YouTube videos, etc,) and store them all in one place.

From the site;

The second bubble is building, and it seems like a new web company is launching everyday. How can anyone keep up with what’s really useful?

Our goal is to garner quality reviews and editorial content that reveal the truth about the buzz.

The editorial guidelines for writing reviews are as follows;

1. Try to keep reviews relevant to the company in question. Do not use reviews solely as a billboard for promoting a rival company.
2. Talk about its features: What do you like? What don’t you like? Be specific.
3. If you hate the company and its services, don’t just rant about it. Make a suggestion!

Apart from adding contacts manually, you can import existing contacts from your other address books such as email, instant messenger, Outlook, MySpace, Digg, etc - or you can also search the site for pre-existing Tabber members and add them with a simple click.

Tabber offers many features above and beyond a normal address book. You can get Google map directions to your friends’ houses, use tags to organise them, be alerted of any changes your friends make to their personal data and keep up to date on what your friends are doing online, such as articles they have recently dugg, recent blog entries, MySpace updates or photos uploaded to their online galleries. If you want to view the recent activity of all your contacts, or perhaps a group you have tagged with similar attributes, you can do that too.

It’s worth checking out, but I think it would be most valuable if your contacts became active members too.

Other intersting findings include;

• At present, search engines still receive more visitors than social networking sites.
• Younger users are more likely to visit and interact with a social networking site, with 68% of 18-24-year-olds surveyed visiting MySpace in the month leading up to the survey, versus 65% for YouTube and 42% for Facebook.
• 28% of men visit YouTube at least once a month compared to 12% of women.
• Up to 90% of visitors to social networking sites do not make posts.

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, that refers to a perceived second-generation of Web based communities and hosted services — such as social networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O’Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted.

Though the term suggests a new version of the Web, it does not refer to an update to Internet or World Wide Web technical specifications, but to changes in the ways the platform is used. According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.“