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Facebook on the Job
SlashGear Week in Review – Week 50 2010
ISP Porn block proposals as UK government start smut smackdown
Nexus S gets SIM-free pre-order price cut

Posted: 19 Dec 2010 11:27 AM PST

When I took a look back at the original Tron movie, one thing that struck me, one thing that I hadn’t remembered since I last watched the movie so long ago, was that the encapsulating plot was really about a company that was cutting off its employees’ access to the outside world. Jeff Bridges’ character Flynn can’t get access to the corporate mainframe from outside the company. So, he enlists the help of a couple old friends who still work for Encom, Those friends are disgruntled because their access has been restricted while the company conducts a security review, trying to figure out who has been hacking into the system. It turns out, the company was right to be suspicious. Even though Flynn is vindicated by the evidence he finds, the company was right that there was a security risk.

Was it right to shut out the current employees? I’m not sure. On the one hand, the company was right to be suspicious of its employees, or at least right to take precautions that would limit access. On the other hand, you could argue that it was Encom’s draconian security policies that pushed Flynn’s friends into helping him break into the system.

If you place trust in your employees, you get trust in return. If you go out of your way to restrict employees’ access, you get a workforce that tries harder to circumvent those restrictions, without the endemic trust necessary to run a collegial work environment.

Today, the question isn’t just whether companies should restrict access to sensitive, proprietary information. There is also a question about whether employees should have access to their own personal information while on the job. Should an employee be able to check personal email or update a Facebook status while at work? I’ve heard of very few corporate jobs where employees are restricted from taking the occasional, brief personal call at their cubicles. After all, as someone who works from home, how would I ever find the remote control if I couldn’t call my wife at her office to find out where she hid it?

But there are different issues at play when social networking gets involved. Foremost there is the question of security. It is too easy to reveal company secrets or proprietary information without even thinking about it, if you are constantly worried about telling your friends what you are doing, or sending off pictures of funny things you’ve encountered in your work space. Note to friends: office humor is never as funny as you think it is. That doesn’t mean I don’t like seeing pictures of your Boba Fett lego minifigs spelunking the office toilet, but you’re not going to get a LOL out of me.

Let’s assume that security isn’t the problem, though. Are there other reasons why an employer should restrict Facebook access? Facebook is the biggest time waster on the Internet right now. Doesn’t that mean access will cut into productivity? Perhaps, but I think it depends more on your style of management and your corporate culture.

For a couple of years I was an office manager at a technology Web site. I was responsible for hiring and firing employees, and for motivating my staff to be productive and enthusiastic about their jobs. We were a relatively small, but not unnoticed site, and my staff was almost always young and fresh out of college. For many, it was their first real, salaried job with benefits.

I tried to take a laissez-faire approach. I didn’t want to be an overlord, I just wanted them to do a good job. Mostly, though, I wanted my staff to take initiative. Web writing is, by nature, a field that requires some ingenuity and tenacity. For the most part I tried the positive reinforcement approach, praising what I thought was good and mostly ignoring the stuff I thought was bad. My focus was on the results of my employee’s labor, not the process that led up to those results. So, if an employee wanted to work from home, that was fine if they got their work done. If an employee wanted to spend time on instant messaging clients, that was fine as long as they didn’t miss deadlines and turned in work on time.

Occasionally, this backfired. I had one employee who was stupid enough to leave the sound on his machine turned up. Every time he got an incoming IM, I heard it. It was grating. I might have ignored it, except that there were other problems, as well.

I had a difficult time getting in contact with this employee. When he was out in the field testing a product for a review, he would not answer text messages or emails, and often missed phone calls. For the most part, his submissions were timely and the quality of his work wasn’t bad, but he had created a perception problem in our relationship that was impossible to overcome.

I felt like his friends and family had no trouble contacting him on work time, but I couldn’t seem to reach him. Whether or not this was as bad as I thought, just the fact that I noticed the constant influx of IMs, while I had trouble getting hold of him, made me frustrated.

I started getting more annoyed at the other ways he was stretching the bounds of my relaxed oversight. Instead of positive praise, I started giving him ultimatums. I wanted him in the office on time. I wanted a response to emails or phone messages within a certain time period. My deadlines grew more strict. I’m not someone who gives ultimatums and then does not follow through. Eventually, I fired this employee.

Was his work so bad that he deserved to be fired? Well, it wasn’t good enough that I thought it was worth overlooking all of the other problems we had. But in retrospect, it was probably more of a perception issue than a performance problem.

If you are a stellar employee who performs beyond all expectations, I doubt your employer would have any problem with your Facebook activities (within reason, of course). If you give your boss the impression that you are attentive and present during work hours, and that your primary concern during your work day is the welfare of the company, IM chatting and the occasional phone call would never be a problem.

The same is true on the other side of this equation. Even after the trouble I had with this employee, and similar trouble with others, I still kept my laissez-faire philosophy. I’m not my employees’ parent or guardian, nor am I their school teacher or camp counselor. I am their boss, and my job is to help the employee achieve the company’s goals to keep us profitable and growing.

I’m not going to be so naïve to think that my employees must be productive for 8 hours straight in a work day. There needs to be breaks. Sometimes a few minutes spent on Facebook or Twitter helps fight fatigue and refreshes an employee’s mind. Sometimes checking in with a friend or loved one keeps the employee from feeling isolated and lonely. I know that it works for me, as a worker. But I also know when to close the right tabs in my browser, to log out of Facebook and leave Twitter alone for a while.

Mostly, though, I know that while it can be difficult to be exceedingly productive, it is even more difficult to fight the negative perceptions that come from disengagement at work. If you’re going to spend part of your work day, part of the hours for which you are being paid by your company, doing your own personal thing, you need to build confidence in your employer that overall you are more than worth the company’s money and time. If you wait until your boss has to crack down and start issuing ultimatums, chances are it’s already too late.

SlashGear Week in Review – Week 50 2010

Posted: 19 Dec 2010 07:13 AM PST

Welcome to this week’s edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! This is the last edition before Christmas; I hope you have your shopping done! Last Sunday we went hands on with the LG VL600 LTE modem and it was really cool. We like the service, but the scant data limits of 5GB and 10GB will keep many from adopting if they plan to use it as a broadband alternative. Monday some really cool cases for the iPhone 4 surfaced from Gear 4 that fans of Angry Birds will like. The cases come in three styles with colors and characters from the Angry Birds game.

More rumors swirled about a half-size iPad that suggest Apple may be working on a smaller version of the iPad. That would be no surprise even if Jobs did already say 7-inch tablets are DOA. A geek took some sticky notes and a string of Christmas lights and hacked them into a way to show which of his pals were online. The lights the geek used are the GE Color Effects GE-35 LED sting and the LED data bus was hacked to create the IM status device.

Coloud has been making headphones that are sports and super hero branded for a while now and those were cool. The company has now rolled out an epic R2-D2 themed set that is really cool and sell for a tick under $50. The rumor that will not die made another round this week with the Verizon iPhone said to be coming right after Christmas. The device is also said to be an LTE handset.

A phone design concept popped up by researcher Fabian Hemmert that has tactile feedback. The phone could hold your hand, blow on you, and kiss you. This will single handedly bring new meaning to phone sex me thinks. One analyst is saying that a new HP webOS tablet is set to hit the market in March 2011. BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman cites sources in Asia for the tip.

A group of Japanese guys got together and created cool skydiving simulation using Google Earth, a projector, and some fans. The result looks pretty fun and more realistic than you might expect. German doctors made a claim this week that the world has been waiting to hear for decades. The doctors claim to have cured a patient of AIDS using stem cells and other techniques.

GNU Founder Richard Stallman stated this week that the Google Chrome OS is careless computing. He points out that when your data is stored on a company machine rather than your own machine you lose some of your legal rights. An awesome DIY Tron Skatecycle was spied early in the week and the thing has glowing wheels that look like the new lightcycles. The device started out as a device skate cycle called the Freerider.

A cool map of the world that highlights Facebook relationships shows just how connected we are globally. The map shows 10 million pairs of friends out of the 500 million people on the social network. Analysts said this week that they think a Verizon iPhone will gain users mostly at AT&T’s expense. That would mean that the number of new users to the iPhone with Verizon offering one would be less than some might expect.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was named the Time Person of the Year for 2010. The magazine says that the site founded by Zuckerberg has changed the way people relate to each other. Tablet sales in the business world are predicted to double according to a ChangeWave survey of businesses. Most of the businesses want to use the iPad and 7% of the businesses surveyed say they already give employees iPads.

A cool new way to raise money for charity has been unveiled by Google. Money for each opened tab on the Chrome browser will be given to charity with a new “Chrome for Cause” program. A wild looking stringless guitar from Misa Kitara has surfaced. The guitar uses a touch screen for strings and can be pre-ordered now for $849 on a normal plastic version of $2899 for an aluminum version.

A crazy self-sterilizing door handle won a Concept Design Award. The thing is really cool and kills off germs on its own. Door handles transmit more germs and illness than I care to think about. Geeks and Lego never fail to impress and this cool T-800 bust made from Lego is no exception. The statue even has glowing red eyes and base has tiny Lego skeletons inside.

For most of us, the largest utility bill is electricity. A concept home has debuted that is square and covered in solar panels to generate electricity. The panels power the hot water, lights, AC and all else in the concept and might even have power to sell back to the electric company. I have never seen a house key that was cool until the Keybrid turned up. The key has a ring integrated into the design and can be used as a money clip or clipped to other things. You can pick up a pair of the things for about $17.

Word Lens for the iPhone is an app that can translate signs in a foreign language so you can read them. The app is cool and it only works for printed text (naturally). PDP is showing off its cool Tron: Legacy controller that is licensed by Microsoft for the Xbox 360. The controller has glowing orange lines and sells for about $50.

EA has some of its coolest iPhone and iPad games on sale right now for the holidays at 99 cents. There are a bunch of different games available from Tetris to Madden NFL and more. A live video demo of the Notion Ink Adam tablet surfaced from the company for us all to drool over. The tablet looks pretty cool to me, check out the video for yourself here. Thanks for reading this week’s edition and have a Merry Christmas!

ISP Porn block proposals as UK government start smut smackdown

Posted: 19 Dec 2010 06:26 AM PST

The UK government is apparently considering plans that could see pornographic content blocked by default to home internet connections, with households required to opt-in to XXX-rated entertainment. According to The Sunday Times [subscription required], key UK ISPs will be meeting in January 2011 to discuss the proposals, which some government ministers are describing as tackling the “wild west” internet.

According to Conservative MP Claire Perry, the proposals “are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective.” Instead, she and government peers “just want to make sure our children aren’t stumbling across things we don’t want them to see.”

UK ISPs are apparently already complaining that such blocking measures would be both technically tricky and expensive to implement. It’s worth noting that UK mobile data networks already have adult-content blocks in place, requiring validation – by credit card or other methods – that users are over 18 if they want to access websites carriers believe contain media unsuitable for minors.

[via The Next Web; image credit Luke Robinson]

Nexus S gets SIM-free pre-order price cut

Posted: 19 Dec 2010 06:14 AM PST

Google’s Nexus S is, as we decided in our review of the Gingerbread smartphone, probably the best Android handset around today, but with a surprise price-cut the UK pre-order is even more tempting. Retailer Carphone Warehouse has slashed the price of the SIM-free Nexus S to £429.99, a cut of almost £120.

The Nexus S went up for pre-order in the UK back on December 13, priced at £549.95 contract-free. Meanwhile the contract price for a free Nexus S has also seen a cut; down from a £35 per month agreement – over two years – to £30 if you want the free phone.

UK deliveries of the Nexus S are still expected to kick off before the end of December. More details here.

[via Android Community]