It's not clear how the financial impact was measured but we're apparently losing £325m in working time to Twitter. As with its timewasting predecessor Facebook, businesses are beginning to clamp down on Twitter in the workplace, citing the average 56 minutes per week spent on updating, replying, re-tweeting, DMing, trending and "orchestrating campaigns" as wasting company resources. And yes, no matter how urgent some Tweets seem at the time, life can continue without most of the 140 characters or less missives that fly around.
However, while Twitter is not the ideal way middle and senior management would want their staff to spend their time, it is an increasingly important part of media, both old and new types - how could the recent Trafigura, Stephen Gately and angry Tube staff stories have concluded the way they did without loud cawing from the Twitterers? And during work hours too. Could that aforementioned cost to businesses one day become profit thorugh harnessing the awesome righteous power of Twitter? Could tapping away on mobile phones in corridors become the new way to work? Will anyone ever be overheard saying "Hold all my Tweets, I've got to DM the suppliers to clear up this delivery problem"? Well, probably not. Because, from bitter, humiliating, personal experience, you can lose a whole day trying to undo a single click.
It wasn't us in the video. And our password has been re-set. And we'll be working late to make up for the time spent Tweeting apologies and warnings to everyone we accidentally phished down through our contacts list, who may also have lost a lot of company time re-setting their passwords and apologising to those they phished by accident. Maybe there's some truth in the lost £325m after all...
