Facebook as most of us know is a highly booming and addictive social network site. 

The site allows for people to communicate with friends they know by adding them to a ‘friend list’ allowing for various interactions from private messaging, a publicly viewable wall of messages, photo galleries, videos, and all sorts of apps that keep pulling users back into the site repeatedly. 

The site started off as a university directory in America, but then took off as a worldwide social network.

Australia alone subscribed to an amount of 195,000 by 29^th July 2007. 10 days later this figured jumped up to 224,000. 

There are various groups on facebook that are dedicated to each company, down to people who just ‘slack off at work’. Users who sit not far from each other at work bypass the use of internal email and use facebook instead for non work related conversations. 

While some companies are restricting facebook internally, others are establishing protocols by which these sites, or other social networking sites, can be used.

On an average, an employee would spend an hour each business day on facebook – costing the company roughly $6200 per day. 

Multiply that 800,000 business across Australia and you have your $5bn problem.