Workers surfing the social-networking site Facebook could be costing their employers billions of dollars in lost productivity, an analysis by an Internet security firm said Monday.
The popularity of Facebook is spreading rapidly both in the United States and abroad, 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 that Australian workers who keep a close watch on their Facebook profile page were cumulatively costing their employers up to 5 billion Australian dollars ($4 billion) a year.
"People love being there and telling people what they are doing right now, what their thoughts are right at this second," SurfControl Chairman Richard Cullen told Australian radio.
"It's so interactive that people just get addicted to watching their Facebook groups all the time."
Facebook allows friends to keep in touch, post photos and monitor one another's moods and movements. It also
Cullen said his findings were based on a typical Facebook user, earning an average wage, spending an hour a day online. He then calculated the cost to companies, if one person in every organization spent an hour on Facebook instead of working.
"We got the extraordinary figure of 5 billion (Australian dollars)," he said.
Cullen said banning Facebook from work computers was not necessarily the best way to combat the wasting of time by employees; Facebook encourages socializing, he said, which in turn makes people happier to work longer hours.
