Akin to LeechBlock for Firefox, Benedetto's StayFocusd attempts to correct fundamental productivity issues associated with the social Web by allowing users to only spend an allotted amount of time on a "gray list" of websites. For example, if you give yourself 20 minutes a day to screw around on Twitter and Facebook, StayFocusd will block your access to those sites once it's determined that your 20 minutes have been used.

The extension steps in where the average user's self-control or restraint falls short. As one of many users who've switched from Firefox to Chrome and found they still wanted and needed certain familiar Firefox extensions, Benedetto said he lost several hours each day to Chrome's unbridled browsing before realizing that LeechBlock's absence was killing his productivity. So he took matters into his own hands, wrote his Chrome extension and released it to Google's Chrome gallery.

The extension is highly customizable, letting users block or permit whole sites, only certain subdomains or even specific pages.

"That means," writes Benedetto, "you can block delicious.com, while still allowing access to delicious.com/save so you can add new bookmarks. Or you can block Google.com/Reader while still having access to the rest of Google's sites. Or you can block the entire Digg.com domain, and recapture 4-6 hours of wasted time per day."

We'd install this awesome extension ourselves if our job didn't entail, you know, wasting time on the Internet.

Transfusion Media is an a L.A.-based web studio specializing in graphic design, Facebook apps, Flash widgets and general interactive and web development. Benedetto has previously been a source for us, opining intelligently on the state of Web design in a 2009 article directed toward startups.

Yet today, there's new information being released that seems to say something different about the state of social networking applications in the workplace. According to Nucleus Research, Facebook causes a 1.5% decrease in employee productivity.

According to the Nucleus Research survey, employers are losing 1.5 workers per 100 in employee productivity to the supposed time-wasting activity known as "Facebooking." To reach that number, the company surveyed a random sampling of 237 office workers.

The findings revealed that nearly two-thirds of those who visit Facebook do so during business hours and they stay on the site for an average of minutes per day when they do.

Despite what you've heard touted about the necessity of Facebook in today's business world, those responding to this survey overwhelmingly admitted they didn't see any business reason for using the site. In total, 87% of respondents basically said their time on Facebook at work had no business-related purpose.

Of course, given the small sample size of this survey, it's hard to form any definitive conclusions...although that hasn't stopped Nucleus Research from doing so. They're suggesting that companies "evaluate their Facebook policies and the cost to the organization...as today blocking Facebook may actually result in a 1.5 percent gain in productivity."

A Second Opinion

We think that Nucleus Research isn't seeing the bigger picture here, so we'd like to counter their research with some findings from the University of Melbourne. U of M professor Dr. Brent Coker also surveyed a small sample of office workers (300 to be exact) and came to a rather different conclusion.

He found that people who took small breaks between tasks were 9% more productive than their colleagues who did not. "It gives them a chance to reset their concentration," says Coker. That means that companies who block access to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are actually inadvertently decreasing employee productivity.

Besides, we hate to break the news to Nucleus Research, but employees have always found ways to take these sorts of small mental breaks at work. Before social networks - heck, before computers, even - workers would typically gather around the water cooler for some mindless banter. Others take cigarette breaks, head to the vending machines, or stop by a co-worker's office for chit-chat as they make their way through the office. Employees don't need Facebook to goof off, you see.

But out of all the ways to take a break at work, Facebook really seems to be the least offensive - especially if the employee has built up a work-related network of friends and colleagues on the site. Who knows? They might even find themselves chatting about work while on Facebook!

At the end of the day, though, this isn't a simple black or white issue. Sometimes using Facebook may be productive for employees, sometimes it's not. Either way, the knee-jerk reaction from organizations shouldn't be to simply block access to the social network. Perhaps businesses should just focus on rewarding the employees who perform their jobs well and disciplining those who don't do their work? That seems like a more reasonable way to stimulate employee productivity, don't you agree?

Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr Brent Coker, from the Melbourne Department of Management and Marketing. Got that? You can spend as much as 20% of your time at work dorking around on the internet and still end up 9% more productive than people who don't! Print this article and put it in your wallet for the next time you get in trouble for browsing on the job, eh?

In fact, this isn't an entirely worthless insight. We like to use StumbleUpon every once in a while just to run some cool water through the pathways of the brain associated with imagination.

Really, though, reading news feeds at work and using social networking sites (especially Twitter) can lead to so many multiples in productivity that any surprise over this 9% finding is hard to wrap our heads around.

On-demand access to geographically dispersed, topic-specific knowledge and feedback through both synchronous and asynchronous communication over multiple technology platforms is what social media use at work can be and that is a game changer. Could someone please study that?

What this study says to us is that the social web is so incredibly powerful that even people who don't know how to use it find themselves made 9% more productive because of it - on accident. Studying that seems like missing the point, though it is interesting.

Photo: Shock-ed by Flickr user CarbonNYC.

We wrote a similar post last November ("30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them") and can happily report that we're still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30-day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for a while. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!

Here's this month's list. It's split into 3 categories: search-related services, iPhone apps and productivity tools.

Search-related.

1. Twitter Real-time Search in Google

25 days ago we reviewed a simple Greasemonkey add-on that displays Twitter search results for your search query at the top of Google search results pages. The entire team is still using it and Frederic in particular calls it "the best thing since bread came sliced." Sarah Perez says "that twitter google script is the invention of the year, can't image life without it...not kidding."

2. Add Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and more to Google Search Results

We question whether Phil Glockner really saw this one a month ago, since we wrote about it two weeks ago, but it's a keeper!

3. Google Preview

Phil added this one to the list as well; it adds thumbnails to Google search results.

What does a Google search results page look like with all of the above turned on? Here's a screenshot.

4. Google Voice

Frederic reviewed Google Voice earlier this month and he says he's still using it happily!

5. GCal PopUp

The GCal Popup plug-in was a month old for me in our last 30-day round up, but now Phil is a recent convert. This Firefox plug-in gives you super-easy access with a click to your Google Calendar and has increased our use of GCal many-fold. I've tried poking the code to create multiple buttons like it for other sites, Basecamp in particular, but the developer says just that is on the way soon. I hope so.

6. Drag and Drop Zones

I use lots of search engines throughout the day and the Drag and Drop Zones Firefox plug-in has made it super-easy to do. I love it.

iPhone apps.

7. Flickit

Rick reviewed the Flickit Flickr uploader for the iPhone here last month and I've been using it ever since. It goes a long way towards solving the lack of MMS on the phone.

8. NYTimes iPhone App

We reviewed the latest version of the NYTimes iPhone app at the top of this month and both Sarah and I have been using it regularly. I've been flying a lot lately and the off-line reading is great.

9. Instapaper

The only thing better than offline reading of the NYTimes on an iPhone is offline reading of anything. Instapaper recently helped me find the time to read Alex Iskold's last 10 blog posts while flying from Indianapolis to Portland. I landed feeling much smarter. Thanks Instapaper!

10. Yelp

I used to use Google 411 a lot. Now I use Yelp on the iPhone and I love it. I've even discovered restaurants close to my house that I didn't know existed.

11. Tweetie

Apparently Sarah and I both just discovered the best iPhone app for Twitter. I love seeing people innovate on top of Twitter, so hopefully other even cooler apps will come out soon.

12. Kindle on the iPhone

Frederic reviewed the Kindle on the iPhone and liked it so much he's kept it. Steve Jobs may think no one reads anymore, but he's forgetting the people who study the foundational mythology of 11th -13th century British monasteries. That's what Frederic does when he's not writing for RWW and he loves the Kindle on the iPhone!

13. QuickVoice

QuickVoice is a fully featured audio recorder for the iPhone. I'd never heard of it but Sarah Perez likes it and, after looking, I'm about ready to buy it too. It looks awesome!

14. SnapDat

SnapDat is an iPhone digital business card exchanging system. Sarah reviewed it while at DEMO and called it serviceable but not great. Apparently it's good enough because she's still using it.

15. PixelPipe

Frederic and Sarah are big fans of PixelPipe on the iPhone. It lets you post to multiple sites and is similar to Flickit above.

Productivity

16. Morning Coffee

The Morning Coffee plug-in for Firefox lets you set up a list of tabs to open with a single click. It has helped me continue to use websites I might have forgotten about. I'm very thankful for it. Now that I think about it, I should add Basecamp there. Maybe then I could remember to use the darned thing.

17. Doomi

Doomi is a handly little Adobe AIR to-do list. It's simple. I tried it and I like it.

18. DestroyTwitter

DestroyTwitter is an AIR Twitter client that Phil started using more than a month ago and is still using today. When I questioned his choice of clients he said: "Have you used Destroyflickr? It's really amazing.. and DestroyTwitter is the same way.. something about the smooth transitions, the intuitive interface, and its unobtrusiveness appeals to me more than other products."

19. FriendFeed Notifier

Frederic and Sarah are loyal users of this service and I just started using it today. We reviewed it 2 weeks ago but it looks like a keeper. (See picture on the right.) If you're insane and want constant stimulus, which we all are and do here at RWW, give it a try.

20. ClikBall

Phil is still using ClikBall to find and share links. I wrote a very positive review of ClikBall here but found that I didn't know very many people who were using it. It didn't pass my test but it did pass Phil's.

21. PostBox

PostBox is a desktop email manager built by a team that includes the creator of Firefox's Thunderbird. TechCrunch has the best review of the service.

22. Alltop OPML and Search

Looking for the best blogs on a wide variety of topics? Alltop is a good place to start. This Greasemonkey script adds buttons to grab all the blogs in a section of the site as an OPML file and to search inside that section. It's Phil Glockner-approved.

23. Enjoysthin.gs

Enjoysthin.gs is a very visual social sharing service. The user experience is fantastic. We called it a dazzling new way to share multimedia and I've been visiting it every day since then, thanks to the Morning Coffee plug-in described above. It's great for research and inspiration!

That's Our List - What's On Yours?

We'd love to hear which apps, plug-ins, scripts, etc. our readers have tried for a little while and found to have some sticking power.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we'll be honest with you - we love our computers. Not just the web. In that spirit we thought we'd offer readers some short video tours of the apps we use every day. You may discover some things you want to try out for yourself.

I recently got my baby back from the Mac shop and am so thankful! We kept these tours of our computers under five minutes, so they move pretty fast and don't include everything. Following this video is a list of links to the apps discussed, followed by a video of Sarah Perez's Windows computer.

Click these images to open the 5 minute videos full size in a new browser window.

Apps Discussed

JingProject Related: Screencasts Rock: Here's Who's Rocking Them Now
FFFFound See also: 3 Cool Sites to Bookmark Your Favorite Images on the Web
Iterasi See our latest write up
Agglom See our review
URLBarExt See our review
StumbleUpon Check out our latest coverage
Greasemonkey See also start using greasemonkey in 5 minutes
GreasedLightbox
HeadUp See our review
Smultron
FluidApp Marvel at an awesome use case
AirFoil
Snackr Here's our review
Skitch Here's every time we've mentioned Skitch here
Adium Our latest coverage
Yuuguu Our Yuuguu mentions
Screenflow
Screensteps Here's our review
CamTwist
JungleDisk
Tweetdeck
Songbird
Automator - Comes with your Mac, I'd never learned to use it until just a few weeks ago and it is awesome! I ran out of time to describe it in this video but I'll include a screenshot of one of its functions below just to give you an idea what it does and how easy it is.
Multiclutch - didn't get a chance to describe this, but if you have a Macbook Pro, just go try it! It's awesome!

Below: the Automator

Sarah's PC

Sarah Perez says of her Windows machine: "It's a pink Dell. I love pink. I know, I know...I'm such a cliche! I'm dying to replace it with a netbook that fits in my purse." Her computer is almost entirely unlike mine. I thought it was a lot of fun to see!

Again, click on the image below for a full screen video and check out the links below.

Software Discussed

Firefox
Twhirl
Windows Live Writer (Windows Live Download)
Skype
iTunes
FileZilla
Google Chrome (for Google Calendar) See our coverage
RocketDock
Tumbleweed See 10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love
Digsby All our mentions of Digsby
Snackr
TweetDeck
Pando
Doomi See 6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out
TrayEverything
Live Mesh See our review

What About You?

Are we missing out on anything that we really should try? Have you got a screencast of your computer laying around someplace? :) Let us know in comments and we can all learn from each others' computing experiences. We love web apps, but you still need a computer to use them!

Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...

The other way startups are adding innovation to the enterprise is through new types of products that are tackling problems such as information overload. An example that we've been wanting to mention for a while now is Cognition Technologies, which is licensing its semantic web technologies to various organizations. Cognition's Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is being used for a number of different applications, from health to law. While not so much enterprise at this time, it's easy to see how Cognition's technology could be used to filter information where ever there is a large data set - which is many businesses these days.

Graphic from Cognition's website

What other startups and products have you noticed lately that are tackling the 'info overload' problem - and so boosting productivity - in organizations?

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price, which ends this Friday.

This will be post #1 of 2 posts on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

This $650 billion dollar problem made the headlines this week, getting write-ups in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Thanks to a research study by Basex, we now have new data on productivity in the workplace. The findings reveal that a typical information worker checks his or her email more than 50 times per day, uses IM 77 times, and visits 40+ web sites. These numbers were calculated by tracking software installed on the machines of the 40,000 people taking part in the study.

Often, workers are dropping high-level tasks to deal with mundane, low-priority tasks that come through via these unnecessary interruptions. The end result is fractured attention where the big loss comes from the time it takes to recover from the interruption and get back to work.

"Productivity" Apps

Although we should know better, it may already be too late for us; we're conditioned creatures who are drawn to these distractions. A pop-up alerting us to new email? We must check it. A flashing IM window? Just try to ignore it. These "productivity" apps, it seems, by their very nature, have been designed to steal our focus.

Big tech companies are worried, too. They've put together a group called IORG (Information Overload Research Group) whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions.

This group's mission is to:

"Conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload."

It will be interesting to see what they come up with as far as solutions because they're certainly not the first to attempt a solution to the problem. Earlier this year, we covered five methodologies to deal with email overload, which included popular techniques like the GTD method and the 4-Hour Workweek Method. Despite numerous proposed solutions such as these, no one has really hit the sweet spot when it comes to providing real solutions that work for everyone.

Social Media Addicts - Sink or Swim?

For social media addicts, which likely includes readers of this blog, the problem can be even worse. In addition to having our focus pulled away by productivity applications like email and IM, we're also pulled in a number of different directions as well - checking FriendFeed, Twitter, social networks, and more. (I wonder how many billions of dollars we waster per year?)

For many people, these distractions are overpowering. No matter the time commitment, social media addicts can't help but spend entire chunks of their day online playing with the new, shiny internet toys. When we profiled several social media addicts earlier this year on Twitter, we discovered that a good many people spent several hours - even as many as 10 hours per day - online, immersed in the web and social media tools.

It seems we're at a crossroads - there's so much information, but not enough filters. We can either drown in the lost productivity time sink that is the internet or we can swim...swim for our lives. The question is: how?

Click here to read Part 2 of this post

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

While all of that remains true today, the ubiquity of the internet, the ease of publishing and the rise of online advertising has lead to the emergence of new kinds of websites: productivity, how-to and advice/Q&A sites that broadcast, scale and monetize that kind of information.

Productivity Sites

This post was inspired by a list I found on the very top of Del.icio.us Popular last week, titled The Top 100 Productivity and LIfehack Blogs. Posted to a site called CollegeDegree.com, it clearly took some work by someone to put together and will probably bring in a steady flow of traffic for some time.

Making Productivity Productive

Ironically, the list isn't very conducive to productive use once you've found it. Imagine all the time you could waste exploring all those sites! None the less, hundreds of people bookmarked the list and probably intended to come back to it later. It served the publisher well, but how well do such lists really serve readers?

The first thing I think of when I see a list like this is: how much more useful would this be in a Custom Search Engine? A whole lot more useful.

It's in that spirit that we offer you the first of three CSE in this post: the Productivity and Lifehack Multi-site Search. (Note that if you are reading this post in a feed reader, you won't be able to see the embedded search boxes below. You can click through to see the full post.)

I've bookmarked that engine's page and will refer back to it whenever I find myself struggling with a productivity problem that I think someone else has probably solved before.

Curious about how Google Custom Search Engines work? See our previous coverage, Google Custom Search: Setting The Bar For Vertical Search Engines.

How-to Sites

Sometimes we make lists of our own here at RWW. The most successful (and fun) so far has been Josh Catone's Big List of Sites to That Teach You How to do Stuff, a collection of the best How-to and Tutorial sites around the web. Readers loved that list and many contributed more high-quality suggestions in comments. Many of the sites are filled with video tutorials, including on some really obscure topics.

Shortly after we published that list, I threw the URLs in the post and comments into a Google Custom Search Engine. It's proven really useful to me, so here it is for you to use as well.
How-to Site Search.

The How-to of the How-to

Making custom search engines is pretty easy once you've got a list of good sites on a topic. If you've got a list that someone else has already posted somewhere, just run that page through a service like the link extractor from Webmaster-toolkit.com. Then you can copy and paste the relevant links into the very easy-to-use Google Custom Search Engine creation service.

I make these all the time, the hardest part is to compile the list in the first place. The easiest way to make use of this tool is to keep your eyes peeled for lists that other people have already created. That's what I did for the Semantic Web search engine in the RWW toolkit for top issues of 2008, for example. If you're a link-baiting blogger, though, why not offer your readers the added value of putting your lists into a CSE?

When I make one of these CSEs for publication, I try to give it a title and a description that refers back to our brand and URL too.

Advice Sites

Once you've got work (productivity) and weekends (how-to) taken care of, what's left? Love, of course! What better place online to answer your questions about live, love and other non-technical matters than advice and Q&A sites?

If you're looking for a linkbaity list on almost anything, you'll probably find one at Mashable. You'll probably find it through Google, on Mashable, actually. Link list posts have served that site very well, they're undoubtedly one of the biggest contributing factors to Mashable's position as the 8th most linked-to blog on the web and recipipient of millions and millions of monthly pageviews.

I found Mashable's list of advice sites on their list of list posts (sheesh!) and ran that puppy through the Link Extractor.

Take out the internal links, check out the comments to see which links there are good and paste that list into a Google CSE. What have you got? An Advice and Q&A Site Search Engine.

Some Advice

Some lists of sites will make for a better search engine that others. Blogs are particularly good because there's lots of content and Google indexes almost all of it. Company sites aren't as good and application sites aren't much good at all to query. I ask myself whether I can see myself or others querying whatever collection I'm thinking about assembling; it's easy enough to set up that you may as well give it a try, I've set up some search engines that I use regularly, others that I never use anymore.

Obviously this is just one of many ways to add value to a list. Other things we've done here include filtering the feeds in a list through AideRSS to create a "greatest hits" feed for top sources on a topic, we've displayed recent items from or search results regarding the resources in a list using FeedDigest and we've put together Google Presentation slideshows describing how we assembled collections of resources so that other people can repeat the same process.

The point is that linkbait style lists are often not as useful as they might seem. Readers are growing increasingly cynical. They are much better served if you can put just a little extra time into offering them tangible value and demonstrating meaningful investment of energy on your part.

For more on this subject, check out Del.icio.us Popular for the tag Linkbait and ask how you might be able to raise the bar on resource aggregation in the blogosphere.