I'm spending the quiet time during the holidays working with my colleagues on FaceTime's end-of-year analysis of how real-time communications, social media, other Web 2.0 applications - and the malware using these channels - have affected organisations over the last 12 months. We'll release the full results next week, but I wanted to share some early insights.
This year, for the first time, we collected real-world data taken from our Unified Security Gateway appliances deployed across more than 60 participating global organisations. These companies have opted into a program that sends data back to us, so we can analyze Internet application traffic.
So what did we learn?
Facebook represented the largest single Web 2.0 destination that we tracked, hands down. Maybe not a big surprise, but what I find compelling is that only about one percent of attempts to access Facebook were blocked. It shows that our customers are forward thinking companies that view the use of social networks as positive to their business environment - 99 percent of Facebook visits were allowed by IT policy.
These particular employees accessed 890 different Facebook applications over the past few months. Here are the Top Ten applications that were used during working hours on our customers' networks.
1. Facebook Chat (messaging)
2. Private Photo Gallery (photo, dating)
3. Wordscraper (gaming)
4. Do Not Remember (drinking)
5. Word Twist (gaming)
6. Are YOU Interested? (dating)
7. Bumper Sticker (just for fun)
8. MindJolt Games (gaming)
9. Slide FunSpace (messaging)
10. (Lil) Green Patch (gaming)
(Sadly my favourite, WordBubble, didn't make the Top Ten)
This is by no means a statistically relevant sample of the world as a whole, but the data gives us a indication of what's really happening out there in the Web 2.0 world. And it supports the findings from our annual Collaborative Internet study: The lines between employees' work and personal lives are increasingly blurred, and employees feel they have a right to download - or access - whatever they choose on their work computers. (I know I wouldn't feel comfortable working for a company that didn't let me do this!)
Scarily I have two FashionWars invitations outstanding, as I write this - one of them from a seriously unfashionable, tech geek friend. Si, you're scaring me. Please don't do this online, you know neither of us understands Jimmy Choos and the like...
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