Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions

 CANBERRA (Reuters) - Workers surfing the Internet social networking site Facebook could be costing their employers billions of dollars in lost productivity, an analysis by an Internet security firm said on Monday. Facebook is the latest Internet networking craze, with more than 230,000 Australians already signed up and reports of more than 100 new users every hour. 

 Internet security company SurfControl looked at the phenomenon, and found Australian workers who keep a close watch on their Facebook profile page were costing their employers up to A$5 billion ($4 billion) a year. 

Is this just fear mongering, or does the article (and research) have a point?

I think most of these comments that "doing this or that" costs the employer money are fear mongering.  While there are some people who will be unproductive because of things like Facebook the majority of people need these little breaks to stay productive for the whole day.  Whether they spend their breaks checking Facebook or chatting with their colleague in the next cubicle, they'll be "losing their employer money" because they aren't working for every minute of the day.  But if they worked for every minute of the day they'd lose productivity anyway, because we weren't designed to work solidly for 8 hours a day.  Etc, etc, etc!

Yeah, I hear ya...

So then the question becomes - what is the purpose of this article?

I kind of agree with the article because personally I find myself "just" checking Facebook and a hour will go by like nothing!  So it kind of sucks you in and you lose track of what you are doing, but I wouldn't blame it just on facebook, blame it on the internet in general and the companies giving their workers access to it.

blame it on the rain la la la