Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreeRadical | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com