How to duck the Firewall: Get at Facebook through your e-mail (and why businesses shouldn’t block it ayway)
I haven’t tried any of this myself, so I have no idea if it works, but if you’re one of the unfortunate people who have to live sans-facebook during the workday because the site is blocked, there may be a way through:
A new service called MoDazzle makes it possible to use Facebook (and LinkedIn) through email commands.
For instance, you can send an email to fbreadwall@modazzle.com with the subject SELF to read messages posted on your Facebook wall - alter the subject like JOHN to read John’s Facebook wall.
Now I’ve always thought that blocking Facebook—or any other social media outlets—from the workplace is generally not the best approach to the internet. It’s a bit like ignoring the huge glacier that’s crushing Ooog’s hutt next door.
There’s a lot of good that your employees can be doing for your brand just by being out there. Your customers don’t want to deal with a faceless monolith. They want to deal with people. And just knowing that you’ve actually got some of those can be helpful.
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Ok, first, let me state that I personally don’t think companies should block any internet access for their users, that I feel that a healthy work environment includes (generally speaking) the ability to blow off steam by playing.
That said, I understand why companies would block it. It isn’t a matter of wanting to ignore an important medium. It’s a matter of wanting to be sure your employees are focused on their jobs. I look at the amount of time I spend on Facebook doing things that aren’t exactly what you would call important (scrabulous…. taking care of my dragon… siccing my slayer on my new wife’s zombies…), so I understand, just like I look back in time at the amount of time I wasted on USENET. On the plus side, USENET was pretty segmentable. I could give my users access to just msnews.microsoft.com for tech discussions, or set up my own internal server and just pull business related newsgroups.
Also, generally speaking, depending upon how Facebook is blocked, http://boingboing.net/censorroute.html might also be kind of useful.
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