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Comment by alexandros | Hacker News Reader

One thing that just struck me, is that google/gmail will not be banned from workplace computers as often as fb/twitter have been. This alone will be a significant advantage.

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I think in most corporates (outside the software industry) it's the other way around. I can't access gmail/hotmail but can access social networks at work (in finance).

I've asked a couple of friends with corporate jobs, and they said Gmail is usually open but FB is blocked. They also said it doesn't matter, because everyone has a smartphone.

Not a great data point, but interesting none the less.

These days the main reason for blocking FB - Farmville. It has made people ludicrously unproductive.

Next thing we could expect is a Farmville in Gmail.

My impression has been the opposite, that facebook/myspace/etc are blocked more than webmail. The only recent survey I could find that touched on both social neworking and webmail is this one from august:

http://www.scansafe.com/content/employers-crack-down-social-...

"76% of companies are choosing to block social networking ... and Webmail (58%)"

Of course, if this thing caught on, presumably more companies would block gmail.

Doing consulting in insurance companies, I can tell you Facebook have been banned for a long time, and twitter more recently. As an outside consultant I have gmail, but the employees sometimes don't have it.

I work in a big insurance corp, Facebook not banned there, but twitter and friendfeed were blocked after they appeared on tv or made the news by getting bought for millions. Blocking remains arbitrary and ineffective as about 2/3rds have iphones or similar. RSS remains the way round all the muscle flexing of IT depts, I'm amazed it hasn't been understood mor

I'm guessing the reason RSS isn't cracked down on more is because not enough people are using it. That makes cracking down on it not worth the trouble.

i've mostly seen similar, though they tend to block webmail and social networking sites. data leakage through people sending out confidential documents via webmail is a real concern for big business.

I've been fortunate enough to never have been employed at a company where the employer things its good practice to ban certain websites. How common is this? What field do you work in?

I've worked in Healthcare, Law Enforcement and the Military; the only time it wasn't blocked was when I had my own company.

It's common enough that Gmail has a feature to allow blocking the chat feature and not all Gmail. http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Then it is safe to assume that gmail will have a feature to block buzz... problem solved?

Thankfully in academia things are very relaxed. I just thought of a friend who has this problem and then I realised I know at least 2-3 people in office jobs who have similar issues. I'm in the UK btw.

Academia is indeed relaxed. Most academics I know have their .forward file point to their gmail.

Indeed. Gmail is just about the only successful pine killer I've ever witnessed.

In financial services there are excellent regulatory and operational reasons for blocking a wide variety of web sites.

Perhaps there will be an option to disable Google Buzz for the Google Apps version of Gmail.

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