From the TECH MEANS WASTING TIME Desk: As you all probably know by now, Scrabulous is down. You probably also know it’s due to a lawsuit launched by Hasbro, the makers of Scrabble, and you might have heard that there’s some kind of officially endorsed replacement game.
But that strange scratching noise… that’s the sound of million fingernails desperately scratching at monitors in workplaces across the U.S. and Canada. (By the way, can U.K. Facebook people still play?) For some of us, it was the only thing that made Facebook worthwhile any longer.
It’s times like this I wish the world at large had a viable metric with which to judge office productivity. With more than half a million active users, the end of Scrabulous is probably moving the productivity meter. I just wish I knew how much.
As someone whose job at a 1,500-person company was to monitor all web traffic, I could measure and put a dollar value on lost productivity every time Britney’s crotch was visible. It was shocking. (Both her crotch and the productivity loss.)
—Matt
I’m not so sure – perhaps it’s that I work in a “creative” environment, but I’m a believer in a correlation between slacking and actual productivity (as opposed to apparent productivity).
Of course, I do most of this site at work….