Companies that are still fighting to keep their employees from using Facebook are apparently losing the battle, with games from Zynga scoring some significant victories, according to the latest research from Palo Alto Networks.
The firewall provider released the following statistics about Facebook usage in the workplace:
When measured as a percentage of total social networking bandwidth, active usage of Facebook applications, games, social plug-ins, and posting to Facebook more than tripled, to 28 percent in December 2011 from nine percent in October 2010.
The percentage of total social networking bandwidth consumed by Facebook apps alone also more than tripled over the same period, to 13 percent from four percent.
Zynga games were broken out as their own app ID in May 2011, and since then, they have been found in employee accounts at 53 percent of companies that participated in the study, accounting for some five percent of total social networking bandwidth.