The Ingredients For A Great Intranet Information Architecture

MySpace popularized if not invented the new “social networking” website, but Facebook is revolutionizing the concept.

“A do-everything site with the potential to devour the whole Internet,” according to Christopher Beam of Slate magazine (see How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google).

Facebook started as a college alternative to MySpace, but has exploded in popularity and will soon overtake MySpace as the most visited social networking site. According the ubiquitously accepted Alexa.com website rankings, Facebook is now the 10th most visited site on the Internet – up 6 places since the rankings were last updated (MySpace is unchanged in the 6th spot).

Here’s the shocking reality: Facebook was only opened to the public one year ago. Previously, the Face was only available to college students. Last year, the owners of Facebook reportedly rejected a $900-million offer from Yahoo!

According to an Aussie security firm, Facebook is now so popular that it is being used as the ‘underground’ intranet by many employees. Richard Cullen of SurfControl estimates Facebook may be costing Australian businesses “$5 billion a year.”

 “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” says Cullen, quoted in the Sidney Morning Hearld (see Facebook labeled a $5b waste of time – Technology – smh.com.au).

SurfControl calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company “more than $6200 a year.” And there are approximately 800,000 workplaces in Australia.

Is Facebook really wasting company time? Here’s more from the Sidney Morning Herald article:

“One anonymous enthusiast, quoted in the SurfControl study, said: “Of course everyone checks Facebook at work, duh! I don’t have neither internet nor a TV at home because I like doing more useful things with my time when I’m off work.”

Another user was even more candid. “I work full time as a tax accountant,” she said. “For the past two weeks I’d say I have averaged about 15 minutes of work per day.”

The site has even replaced internal messaging systems and emails, themselves legendary guzzlers of work time, for communicating within offices.

Some employers were restricting employees’ internet use or blocking the sites, Dr

Cullen said. But others are establishing protocols for using social websites. One fear is that Facebook users can make company systems vulnerable to hackers.”

On the opposite side of the coin, Ross Dawson, an Aussie IT consultant believes that Facebook is beneficial to the workplace.

“But this should be contrasted with companies that actively encouraged their staff to use networking sites, such as Deloitte, IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers,” said Dawson in an Australian Financial Review article. “Being able to reach out to the right person for expertise and knowledge – this is one of the primary values of any knowledge-based worker.”

In a more amusing and cheeky interpretation on the subject, How Facebook will kidnap your children & demand a $3 trillion ransom, Aussie IT blogger Matt Moore likens SurfControl’s PR to creating to fear-mongering over coffee as a major hijacker of the Australian economy.

“Using their rigorous scientific methodology, I can predict that coffee will cost Australian businesses $20 billion. Seriously, if 3.2 million Australian workers (say 4 from each of the 800,000 workplaces in Australia) spend approximately one hour a day drinking coffee with each other (about the same time the Facebook obsessives are on there, degrading themselves) then that means that coffee is four times as damaging to the Australian economy as Facebook,” openly jokes Moore.

In short, employees are using Facebook. Not all, but they are using it and more and more will join the ranks. However, it is like anything in life, including sports or fashion websites, or telephone calls to friends or family, or heading out for a bio break or a cigarette… employees will use work time for social activity or learning. No matter how hard you try and stop it, they will take breaks from work.

If a company wants to monitor their time that closely, then they can certainly pay the price – and it comes with a hefty price. Or workplaces can treat employees like adults and measure their workplace performance based on goals and results, rather than measure an employee’s value based on time spent on e-mail and in meetings.

“I don’t have a problem with workplaces monitoring the internet usage of their employees generally.,” writes Moore. “Just so long as the policy on what is permissible is widely accepted and doesn’t stop people from doing their jobs – which may legitimately involve networking with people outside the organization.”