Facebook is the top destination among all social networks and blogs, according to a new report by Nielsen.

Released last week, the report shows the increasing popularity of social networking sites--specifically Facebook--which saw a staggering 140 million visitors in May, or 70 percent of all active U.S. Internet users.

More significantly, these users spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May, with other destinations such as Yahoo! and Google garnering just 17.5 and 12.5 billion minutes respectively.

While there are no statistics available to determine whether the billions of minutes spent on Facebook took place after office hours, I would hardly be surprised if a major portion of the time spent on social networking sites took place from within office cubicles.

One knee-jerk response may be to block Facebook in the office, though the effectiveness of an outright ban is dubious given the increasing number of smartphones and tablets brought to work. Plus there are many ways of circumventing outright blocks, such as by using proxy servers.

I was reading an article on Facebook use in schools by David Strom on ReadWriteWeb last week, and thought that he made a rather interesting suggestion. Strom argued that slowing the speed to "specific sites and protocols" is more effective to get school kids to "tire of waiting for the page to reload, and move on to their legit studies." The same tactic might work in the enterprise.

For more:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at PCWorld

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