FriendFeed Officially a Time Waster as Companies Begin to Block it in the Offices

The issue of companies blocking access of their employees to certain websites has already been discussed a lot and normally I myself am of opinion that the company can determine what activities it is actually willing to pay its employees for - and browsing social networks or watching porn in the office may not really meet the employer’s expectations for what an employee is supposed to do in the office on the company’s time.

But the employees rarely want to tolerate the situation and are always on the run searching for various tools to bypass the interdictions in any way they can. But the companies will hardly believe that all their employees actually need access to social media tools like Twitter or social networks like Facebook to do their job better and will continue to block websites they don’t consider to be actually adding value to the work process.

So the interesting thing to watch is what new websites are added to the list of blocked ones with the latest addition being FriendFeed, the social media darling and obsession of the year with Robert Scoble currently trying to determine if he damaged his blogging by spending too much time on FriendFeed or not.

Yesterday when surfing FriendFeed (and yes, I do happen to use FriendFeed for my work even thought I am self-employed and the issue of blocking is non-existent) I stumbled upon a very animated discussion around a post by FriendFeed user Yolanda who complained she now had access to FriendFeed blocked in the office.

I immediately thought that this means that FriendFeed is now officially considered a time-waster by companies disallowing their employees to access the site from their office computers on the time the company pays for. I have only found a couple of similar situations mentioned by bloggers, users of FriendFeed or Twitter which must mean that the number of companies actually including FriendFeed to their black lists is still a very small one.

But this latest news clearly demonstrates two interesting facts to me. The first one is that FriendFeed is now officially a time waster. Sure, we can all explain how useful it is to spend hours on FriendFeed tracking news and commenting on stories, images or videos here. But I still can hardly believe that a significant portion of internet users actually need FriendFeed for their work while those who do need it will probably be able to explain why to their employers.

And since FriendFeed makes it so easy to spend hours browsing endless pieces of great content without ever having any desire to leave and move elsewhere, an obsession over FriendFeed is a very easy to develop one. And I guess a rare employer will want to pay for the endless hours we can commit to FriendFeed when we suffer the obsession.

The second fact is that this blocking must mean that FriendFeed has probably reached a real mainstream popularity: after all, when your service is blocked by corporations you must be proud they have noticed you and realized the potential dangers as well.

But of course people will find numerous workarounds and ways to waste time on FriendFeed using tools that will make it possible - no matter what one’s employer thinks about it. It is no surprise to me that the thread about Yolanda’s problems was full of suggestions on how to use FriendFeed despite of the blockage. One of the most popular ones was owning an iPhone and using it for FriendFeed. And since Yolanda seems to be heavily addicted to FriendFeed, it only took her one day to actually buy the gadget: a few minutes ago she reported playing with her new iPhone already. (UPDATE: This conclusion turns out to be a wrong one since I am told Yolanda ordered her iPhone before she realized she did not have access to FriendFeed so the fact that she bought the gadget was not connected to her feelings about FriendFeed. Also the statement about addiction is only my personal impression and I apologize to the person in question for making the wrong conclusion here as well.)

So congratulations to FriendFeed team for building something that reached this level of recognition during such a short period of time and to Apple as I have a feeling that heavy FriendFeed addicts will now have a new reason to buy an iPhone. And of course it will be interesting to watch how the growing number of internet users will be looking for new ways to break the ban. Oh, and don’t forget to follow me on FriendFeed here - addicted or not!