Everyone knows that social networking in the office is a series of gray areas wrapped around uncertainty. It’s good, it’s bad – depending on who you talk to. It’s definitely something that businesses have to think about, even though many of them have no official policies in place.

Facebook accounts for 6.8 percent of business traffic, according to figures by managed security company Network Box, which analyzed 13 billion URLs visited by businesses in Q1 2010. Ten percent of business broadband is spent on YouTube videos, and 4.5 percent of business bandwidth is used by Facebook.

The use of both of these, unsurprisingly, is up: Facebook use at work is up one percent over the last quarter of 2009; YouTube watching, 2 percent.

Of course, outside of potential productivity loss, the main concern with the use of social media in the worlplace is the security risk involved. People still don’t seem to get that malware lurks in Facebook apps. For forty-three percent of IT managers, this is the biggest concern.

“The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work,” said Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box.

“There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity,”

According to Nielsen, 47 percent of Americans visit Facebook daily, which is nearly as many who watch TV daily (55 percent).

It’s sort of a cliché to say that young people don’t care about online privacy. According to a study by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pensylvania, it’s a cliché that is far from the truth.

The study’s findings conclude that privacy concerns among young internet users is as important as it is for older users, despite what appear to be laxening of privacy norms that have led some to think we’re headed into the post-privacy era.

“Yes, there are some young people who are posting racy photographs and personal information,” Chris Hoofnagle, co-author of the study, told the Associated Press. “But those anecdotes might not represent what the average young person is doing online.”

The study concludes that teen attitudes towards internet privacy are overwhelmingly the same as for older adults, whether it was refusing to give out information to businesses because they thought it was too sensitive, believing one should get permission before posting photos of others online or that executives should face jail time if they post people’s personal data without permission.

Young people are more confident than older users that the government will protect them from privacy breaches. The study did find that there is a lack of understanding among younger users about privacy law, but it’s probably safe to say that that goes for older users as well.

The study concludes that it’s less an apathy towards privacy than it is a reflection of a paradigm shift still in progress. Consumers have never been able to create content for the mass media, and a shift like this is more radical than we think as we participate in it every day.

Some psychological studies have shown that teens are hard-wired for risk-taking behavior, and the study concludes that this might also be one of the reasons they engage in risky behavior online.

There is also the fact that they might be sharing potentially risky content of information to meet certain social norms. Pretty much the same with adults, except we’re not posting photos of ourselves drinking, we’re checking in to trendy bars.

Email is one of the oldest and most used forms of digital collaboration. It is also the messiest.

There have been improvements over the years, but nothing close to the myriad changes that have happened across the web, and for the most part email hasn’t evolved much since Tom Hanks Got AOL in 1998. The “You’ve got mail” voice bot might be gone, but everything else is about the same.

Still, email is by far  the number one form of collaboration in the U.S., according to a study done by Harris Research for Cisco. It’s the primary means of collaboration for 91 percent of respondents. One of the main reasons, to be sure, is the high comfort level based on 10-15 years of use on the part of most users.

The biggest complaints about email is that there’s too much irrelevant mail (40 percent), that you can’t collaborate in real time (32 percent), email’s limited storage (25 percent) and the fact that it’s very hard to organize large volumes of incoming mail (21 percent).

At the same time, more than half of respondents use social networks and enterprise tools based on social networks, like Yammer, are getting a fair share of market traction. But tools like this seem a long way off for enterprise adoption.

“What the study is really showing is that there is a need to innovate from current email offerings,” said Duncan Greatwood, senior director of engineering, Cisco Collaboration Software Group. “People want to use email as a platform to collaborate on documents, initiate an instant message or video conference, and have ample storage. They want to link their email into social networking tools that are tightly integrated and can help boost productivity.”

Even with the massive push generated by the iPad, touchscreen adoption will be slow and mainly a generational thing, says Gartner. The biggest challenge will be weaning older users off the mouse-and-keyboard computing model that they are used to. Which means that enterprise adoption will be slow.

“What we’re going to see is the younger generation beginning to use touchscreen computers ahead of enterprises,” says Leslie Fiering, research vice president at Gartner.

The analyst firm’s prediction is that by 2015 more than 50 percent of computers purchased for kids younger than 15 will be touchscreen. Which, if true, probably means that the mouse-and-keyboard will be all but extinct in fifteen years.

Or, at best, be like print today.

Gartner expects touchscreen adoption to first happen among consumers and in education, with enterprise adoption falling on the molasses side of the spectrum. Gartner predicts that less than 10 percent of enterprise computers in 2015 will be touchscreen.

“The ‘muscle memory’ of mouse users and the potential problems of moving a user’s hands from the keyboard to the mouse will create particular adoption barriers for knowledge workers,” says Gartner.

What will begin as use of the device for entertainment and casual gaming will eventually warp into full-on computing. While older computers will continue to do the bulk of their computing with the traditional input methods, Gartner expects that younger users will be trained to feel more at ease with touchscreen computing, as they will begin using it at school at an early age.

“An entire generation will graduate within the next 10 to 15 years for whom touch input is totally natural,” Firing says.

(Image: seekis)

The inability to modify or add a third-party layer of code onto proprietary software is limiting the progress and implementation of human-computer interface research, say researchers at the University of Washington.

In response, they have developed Prefab, which turns proprietary software into open source. How? All proprietary software, however different from one another, have something in common: pixels.

“Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the program’s apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

The researchers copy a program’s pixels from a source window and then interpret them with Prefab. They then add enhancements which are mapped to the source. Since Prefab is based entirely on the pixels of an interface, it is operating-system agnostic.

One of the projects, built by a PhD candidate for personal use, was to mashup Microsoft Word and iTunes, allowing him to control iTunes with buttons added to the Word toolbar.

“We really see this as a first step toward a scenario where anybody can modify any application,” Fogarty said. “In a sense, this has happened online. You’ve got this mash-up culture on the Web because everybody can see the HTML. But that hasn’t been possible on the desktop.”

The main goal of the research is to make proprietary software more accessible for the disabled, using tools that have been developed but cannot yet be integrated. For example, the bubble cursor, a target-aware tool that highlights the button that’s closest to it, is potentially useful for patients with motor-control disabilities, but until now has not usable with proprietary applications.

Facebook has a new tool currently in development that will profoundly influence Web content, as TechCrunch suggested Thursday that it would be announced at the F8 Developer Conference in April. The "Like Button," a concept familiar to Facebook users from the "Like" link that appears next to news and shared content.

What began as a local site’s method of friends indicating approval in their friends’ general direction, can soon be embedded into Web sites across the Internet, all ushering individuals back to Facebook.

The Open Graph API is due to deploy in the second quarter of this year and will allow "any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page – users will be able to become a Fan of the page, it will show up on that user’s profile and in search results, and that page will be able to publish stories to the stream of its fans," as described by the Facebook Developers Wiki in the Developer Roadmap category. The Fanbox Widget can be used on any Web site.

The Like Button is the next logical step after the success of Facebook Connect - the login system that enables quick sign-up at blogs or other member sites, while sharing user and friends information in one streamlined package. It also has the potential to be more pervasive than the "Share" button that is also visible on many blog posts like this one (ours is in the ShareThis widget).

This function will compete with other Web-wide social promotion tools, such as the old standards Digg and StumbleUpon, as well as more recent conventions such as abbreviated links on Twitter or posting on Google Buzz. The Like Button seems to share functionality particularly with Twitter’s new @anywhere, CMSWire notes, though the blog had previously likened @anywhere to Facebook Connect.

Just as this button threatens the Internet as we know it, or would believe to read early impressions, so will eSarcasm’s "Indifferent Button," coming sooner.

Internet infrastructure provider VeriSign, Inc has a ubiquitous presence in the Web due to its familiar domain verifier the Trust Seal. In an effort to further combat online fraud, they have introduced the VeriSign Internet Trust Index, which uses statistics to understand how people place trust in the Internet.

These findings were released in the semi-annual report released this month (PDF), all based on a basic scale of 0-100, with zero representing no trust at all and one hundred representing absolute trust. VeriSign scores 61.5 as a moderate level of trust.

In general, more frequent (three or more times per week) and longer (an average of eight years) use results in a consumer that trusts the Internet and technology more. Either parameter’s lower end scores less than 40, while the highest parameter exceeds 80. However, since usage levels outpace trust levels, this indicates that consumers’ trust must be earned.

Another characteristic of these users is that they are more familiar with Internet risks and are most concerned about them. Less than 25 percent of the time do lower-trust infrequent users take security precautions like installing virus protection, checking for security indicators, or making purchases only from well-known sites. More than half of longtime users (over seven years) practice these precautions.

Users who look for security indicators have the highest levels of trust. These indicators include security seals, the SSL padlock and green address bar.

Both frequent and infrequent users agree that the amount of information online is overwhelming, and that no data is safe from hackers.

As of this month, the VeriSign Internet Trust Index is 61.5, indicating that online businesses have not yet gained the complete trust of the Internet public.

VeriSign’s research aims to uncover trust distribution, including levels of Internet riskawarenesess, how consumer perception affects behavior, and the penetration of fraud and identity theft.

American media conglomerate Viacom and Google’s Web Video site YouTube are embroiled in a vicious legal accusation swap that intensified today with a release of court records. What began as a $1 billion lawsuit by Viacom aimed at YouTube for not sufficiently acting on users uploading copyrighted content has now been turned against the the media organization.

YouTube’s main defense consists of claims that Viacom “continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while complaining about its presence there,” as YouTube’s Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine asserts in a blog post.

Initially in question by the Viacom lawsuit was whether YouTube has knowingly benefitted from the publishing of unauthorized material, which could disqualify it from protection by the Safe Harbor section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The policy of the founders of YouTube, according to Viacom, was at best to look the other way, at worst to actively encourage the keeping of material in question so that they would garner more page views, more members, and more advertising revenue.

But the same post insists that Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim consistently discouraged terms of use violations. Instead, Levine claims that Viacom employed third parties to upload clips, deliberately altered them to look leaked or stolen, and used phony YouTube accounts. Viacom also repeatedly tried to buy YouTube.

While legal review has yet to decide who is right in their arguments, the Content ID system that YouTube employs makes Viacom’s case more difficult. This system scans uploaded content for copyrighted material and notifies rights holders if its findings. Rights holders can block, leave up, or monetize these videos.

If the lawsuit ends in Viacom’s favor despite this system, it would establish a precedent that make sites responsible for determining whether content is authorized or not, and weigh prohibitive consequences on sites that decide wrongly.

Another benchmark passed.

Facebook beat Google.com in weekly traffic for the first time, according to Experian Hitwise. Facebook accounted for 7.07 percent of all internet visits last week, while 7.03 percent went to Google.

This is the first time Facebook has surpassed Google for the week, though the social network was the number one site on Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Year’s, as well as the first weekend in March.

Year-over-year, Facebook market share increased 185 percent over the same week in 2009, while Google’s increased 9 percent.

Note that this ranking does not account for other Google sites like YouTube or Gmail, but it is a significant record of how users’ discovery habits are trending towards recommendation-based content and away from traditional search.

“It shows content sharing has become a huge driving force online,” Matt Tatham, director of media relations at Hitwise, told CNN.

“People want information from friends they trust, versus the anonymity of a search engine,” Tatham said.

CNN notes with irony that the last time Google wasn’t number one was in September 2007, when the top spot was held by MySpace, which, after a recent attempt at rebranding, is rumored to be up for sale.

Facebook is also outpacing Google News and Twitter as a discovery source for news. Experian Hitwise reports that Facebook was responsible for 3.64 percent of visits to News and Media sites last week. Twitter, on the other hand, accounted for only .14 percent of similar visits.

Google News fell in the middle, driving 1.27 percent of visits to news and media sites.

Overall, Facebook was the number 3 site for upstream traffic to News and Media sites, while Twitter was 39th. One reason for this is that 60 percent of Twitter users are going Social Media and Entertainment sites, while less than 5 percent go to News and Media sites.

Apple has not only the best tech support, it also has the best customer loyalty engagement, according to independent reports by Consumer Reports and BrandKeys that each place Apple at the top of the list.

According to cnet’s Jim Dalrymple, Consumer Reports rated Apple’s laptop support 86 out of a possible 100, twenty-three points higher than the next best, Lenovo.

Apple scored an 87 for desktop support. The separation between the Cupertino-based company and followers in this category was even wider: the next best was Dell, with 55 points.

Apple was also tops in brand loyalty for several categories on Brandkey’s 2010 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Apple was named the top brand in laptops and smartphones, and the Apple Air was ranked seventh in the netbook category.

The iPhone was BrandKey’s Customer Loyalty Leader in 2009, topping a list of 440 brands. In 2008, the leader was Google, whose brand has become a few shades darker in the past two years.

Obviously, topping Brandkeys and Consumer Reports’ lists is interrelated. Apple has long been lauded for its tech support, and while Apple’s reliability might not be as important part of the brand’s image as it was in the pre-iPod/iPhone days, it is still one of the core drivers of brand engagement.