Every week or two, it seems, the mainstream media reports on a study put out by the Institute for We Hate Technology that tries to put a dollar figure on exactly what the economy is losing per day to social networking. Usually Mike Massnick over at Techdirt jumps on these stories and debunks them in about five minutes flat. We've got yet another of these types of stories to debunk (and if I hurry up with this, I might beat Mike to the punch), but it doesn't come from the mainstream press.
Blogger Pat Phelan, a few minutes ago, posted on exactly what the costs of Twitter were. This stems, obviously, from the meme a few days ago on whether Twitter will ever come up with a business model. If you follow point c back to point a, the thought process of Pat and business partner Florian Seroussi must have been something along the lines of:
"Hey, I've got some ideas on how they can make some money," says Phelan
"Yeah, but it is a lot of requests. Like a gazillion or so, according to these folks on Twitter who seem to have the stats readily and conveniently at hand," retorts Pat.
"A gazillion? Gee, that's going to be a huge hit on the economy! All that lost productivity!" exclaims Seroussi.
Pat then rushes over to the blog to go run some calculations on exactly the lost man-hours, thereby putting out of work the good researchers and doctors at the Institute for We Hate Technology.
If I could channel Massnick for a moment, I'd like to point out the benefits of Twitter usage at the workplace that may offset the lost productivity and man-hours. The easy target for rebuttal is the fact that almost all the facts gathered in Phelan's report were pulled from folks either on Twitter or from sites that had been created to augment the usage of Twitter. There is a definite value in Twitter - and that it is an organic recreation of LazyWeb. Information can be gathered from those in your immediate circle of friends in an instant, as is shown in the original post.