Are companies blocking more social networking site?

There's a lot more articles and discussion about social networking lately, and it's prevalence and use in the workplace. A couple of years ago it would have been easy to say that social networking, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter had no place in the workplace, the decision was easy for IT administrators to block access to these sites from the corporate network.

The Guardian, last week, has even said that after-work life is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by non-working life. Because of this there's a belief that the transparency regarding people’s private lives because of new media such as Twitter and Facebook will make employers more tolerant of social networking — or make employees better behaved on these sites.

“The business use case in Twitter is turning out to be very important,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said last week as the company announced the possibility of cross-posting tweets to the professional network LinkedIn.

But you should still be concerned about crossing the line between business and personal use of social networking. For example, you'll probably want to think twice about tweeting that you hate your new job but are grateful for the fat pay check.

While some companies still allow social networking use in the workplace, a recent analysis of more than a billion Web requests processed by ScanSafe each month showed a 20 per cent increase in the number of customers blocking social networking sites in the last six months.

Currently, 76 per cent of companies are choosing to block social networking and it is now a more popular category to block than online shopping (52 per cent), weapons (75 per cent), alcohol (64 per cent), sports (51 per cent) and Web mail (58 per cent).

Blocking social networking is still an option for any IT administrator, or at least tracking who uses it. But it's definitely something that's going to remain in the news for some time to come.