American workers are increasingly turning to Facebook as a social networking tool. Underline the word networking - as in professional networking. Facebook even offers a Linkedin application called "My Company's Hiring".

While movers and shakers love it, bosses apparantly don't! A new study put out by Sophos, an IT security firm shows roughly 50% of companies surveyed are blocking their employees from Facebook. The most popular reasons given: lost productivity and fear of TMI (too much information) given out about the company.

Another interesting nugget, however, to come out of that same survey shows those businesses that do allow Facebook actually consider it a useful business tool (for their own networking, no doubt). About eight percent of bosses that allow Facebook say they only do so because they fear the employee backlash that would come with taking it away.

Just a casual observation. If your employer is one of the blocking types, it's just as well. You should probably do your personal networking on your home computer, anyway. In fact, anything that involves the word "personal" - as in networking, profile, expression of any kind - is best kept off the company servers. And use an alias while you're at it.