"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

I blame lamers dazzled by shiny new internet gewgaw.

I'm quite impressed that I can add a GG Allin & the Scumfucs song to my profile, though.

City ban on Facebook
By Mark Prigg and Sophie Borland, Evening Standard 27.07.07

About face: leading City firms such as Dresdner Kleinwort have blocked networking sites

More than two thirds of London companies - led by top City firms - are now banning or restricting the use of internet site Facebook over fears that staff are wasting time on it.

Many firms have now warned employees that "Facebooking" during office hours is a sackable offence.

An Evening Standard straw poll of major employers found that more than 70 per cent of the businesses, including banks, law firms, utility companies and government departments, have banned or limited access to social networking sites. Recent figures showed London has overtaken Toronto as the city with the most Facebook users in the world.

More than 826,000 people are registered on the site, a figure that has doubled since May.

The site was first banned by several American and Canadian companies who noticed the large amounts of time employees were spending on it.

A study found British users spend on average 191 minutes a month on Facebook and dozens of people have admitted to "Facebook addiction", where they check on their friends, and often exes, compulsively.

Our study found British Gas, the Met, Lloyds TSB and Bristows law firm all had internet filters preventing sites such as

Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hotmail being viewed at work.

A spokesman for Credit Suisse said: "Staff are forbidden from accessing the site while at work as it is thought that they are wasting company time and money."

A member of staff at investor Dresdner Kleinwort said: "The ban is widespread across all banking offices."

A spokesman for the law consultant-firm ELAS said companies-were well within their rights to sack staff for logging on to Facebook and that the site had caused numerous problems.

"Most contracts nowadays have a clause which restricts internet use to business-use only," he said.

"A manager could quite easily sack someone if they caught them using these social networking sites during office hours. Unless you can argue it is an important work tool, people should not be accessing these sites during work time."

Some companies have imposed "Facebook time" for employees.

"We have imposed a partial ban, allowing employees to access it during their lunch hour," said Amanda Turner of IT recruitment company MDA resources.

"We did have a problem with people using it for far longer than they should."

The internet site, which now has four million users in Britain, was set up in 2004 by 23-year-old American student Mark Zuckerberg.

He is facing a legal threat from a rival website, ConnectU, the owners of which allege they and Zuckerberg conceived Facebook while at Harvard University.

We have successfully persuaded our bosses that using Facebook is a vital part of our job.

More than two thirds of London companies - led by top City firms - are now banning or restricting the use of internet site Facebook over fears that staff are wasting time on it.

So back to ILX it is.

Why the hell is everyone now using facebook as an email replacement? Lame. Stop it.

I assume the same people who used Friendster as an email account. I never understand why they did. Maybe they wanted to live in their little seperate universe?

"Let me check my email - oh it says I have a new message on facebook. Let me check facebook" - repeat until crying blood. I guess as a way of increasing lack of productivity at work it's pretty successful. Except I don't check facebook at work anymore so I can't even read the messages, another reason to cut it out.

Uh, you can change the settings for email alerts, y'know. Which I did. No more clutter. Well, FB clutter that is.

ok, this is weird. everytime i click on my notifications i end up in someone else's account.

My company has just blocked facebook as a restricted site. I can't tell if that's because they've noticed me using it (I am guaranteed to be the only one here), or it's blocked by the rules of our new corporate parents (timing is a little too right for that). I wonder what else they may start to block...

A few of my friends actually prefer to have their big group social arrangement discussions conducted over Facebook now, possibly because it's threaded and keeps email inboxes from being overwhelmed. I'm not really convinced by that just yet.

ok even weirder. when i go back to facebook there are mystery emails in the login form. for now i have c*lld*nielle@y*hoo.com.

now i'm gemm*.skilb*ck@m*tronetalli*nce.com this must be a network thing

has this ever happened to anyone else?

i can't get into it at all at the moment.

We're not acrobats, so no, never happened to me.

now i'm gemm*.skilb*ck@m*tronetalli*nce.com this must be a network thing

At least you're not Steven Mangan any more, nice change of pace maybe

Maybe you have split facebookness? Y'know, in real life split personality syndrome.

It's better than being Dom Passantino but not as good as being Steven Mangan. Swings and roundabouts.

anyone else not able to access their profile?

Mines all skew-whiff with various bits of it obscured, but all the bits that are accessible seem to be working OK.

And there are white blocks obscuring bits of my photos :(

my facebook page:

http://image.bayimg.com/aaejlaabl.jpg

(psyche)

that's from facebook extreme stress test.

jesus christ, is that really your profile???

xpost - oh, ok. my internet connection is running at a snail's pace so that link took forever to load. which means that if one of my friends ever had a profile like that one above (and some seem to be getting dangerously close) i would never visit it.

At this rate, my cat is going to end up with more friends on Facebook than me. Although I don't understand how you can have something cutesy enough to let your cats be friends with each other, but not cutesy enough for them to send messages to each other or write on each others' walls.

Cozen, are you sure yu don't want to stay on MySpace?

i've somehow racked up 39 friends but they consist mostly of old high school acquaintances, ex shags, old uni acquaintances, and a handful of real friends. and ned ;)

Hah! I managed to get about 70 friends. All people I know from here, Kindamuzik and a mailing list. haha

i'm enjoying the voyeuristic nature of it though - seeing what's going on in other people's lives.

but i'm also finding myself feeling quite embarrassed by the fact that every single one of my old acquaintances is travelling extensively/making lots of money/happily ensconced in a relationship.

meanwhile, i am still in my home country, working two crap jobs and going to school. and single.

Traveling: they are escaping their problems.

In a relationship: the other is probably fooling around.

Making lots of money: They have to or the mob will slit their throat because they can't pay off their debts accumulated through online betting.

;-)

oh, nathalie - you're awesome!

I have searched for maybe 75 people from my school, univ, work past and present, friends, neighbours, band-mates, family.....

...and have found only 2 people outside of ILX who are on Facebook. For various reasons I'm not sure that I want them as friends anyway.

Loads of people I've asked have never even heard of it. I'm trying to figure out what that means (apart from the fact that I am old and everyone I know is old too).

acrobat, mine was doing that earlier as well.

i am mainly using mine for playing scrabble btw.

ha. it's freaking me out because i keep ending up in other peoples inboxes.

i had a big ass message i sent completely vanish into the void :(
facebroke

that happens on myspace all the time too, so i've taken to writing in a notepad file or cutting and repasting them.

hi new friend mark c!!!

;)

facebook is funny shit

"Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience."

been saying this since last night

Seems fine for me.

Facebook doesn't want to be Stevem's friend!

2 Ghetto Scrabulous 4 Dem

i just joined the ILE group. let the games begin!

ok, now i have full access to the account of someone called katie hobbs but no access to my own.

to the account? hoo. the fun you could have.

i sincerely hope nobody is having the same fun with mine.

might be worth dropping facebook a line and saying, er, dudes, this isn't good.

if you're going to go on a wrecking spree, do it first, natch :)

i'd guess they probably have an idea, it does seem to be happening a lot...

Hi Ruby R!

Facebook is working fine for me. Possibly too well.

What's the rule about letting people go? Is there a notification that gets sent to them?

apparently not - when i mentioned upthread that i had accepted a friend req from an old moronic ex out of politeness CJ (i think) told me that you can unfriend people and they don't get a notification.

scrabulous is ruining my life.

Ah, okay so. Scrabulous is the devil.