Company attitudes toward social media sites vary. Some swing the doors wide open, allowing employees to tend to their Facebook farms and update Twitter statuses throughout the day. Others lock 'em down, keeping non-business site access to a minimum.

A recent study found that, in the United States, 77% of employees with Facebook accounts check in with the community from the office. And, the amount of time they're spending in this part of the online world is growing. In the United Kingdom, another study found that 57% log in regularly from work, costing their employers 40 minutes a day.

Philip Wicks, a consultant at Morse PLC, a technology research firm in London, "It isn't just something you can do for half an hour during a lunch break but all through the day and because of that, it has a huge impact because people aren't necessarily concentrating on what they should be doing during the day." He estimates that this translates to lost productivity of $2.25 billion a year.

It seems like the obvious move would be to block the sites, but William Beers of PricewaterhouseCoopers disagrees. "Instead of trying to shut it down, I think we should try to embrace these technologies, put in a nice policy that governs it and explain to users the risks related to it, provide some training and then see what business benefits we can have from it," he said.

Have you ever looked at your Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) Flickr account and thought, "Why am I doing this? I can just throw my pics up on Facebook"? If this has crossed your mind, you're not alone. In fact, many photo-sharing sites – Snapfish (NYSE: HPQ), Photobucket, Picasa (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Shutterfly, as well as Flickr – are asking the same questions. With the development and enhancement of photo management capabilities in major social networking websites, niche players need to find new ways to stay relevant.

The situation is still far from grim. Fed by traffic from their behemoth owners, the photo-sharing sites remain substantial forces, and they are currently home to more than 20 billion pictures. There's still plenty of interest in these environments ... which has been bolstered by specific features that make the likes of Flickr attractive to both professional photographers and amateur shooters. The ability to order prints and personalize portfolios, for example, still provides an edge over sites like Facebook and MySpace (NYSE: NEWS).

Nonetheless, the threats from the social networking space are quite real.

I was once a teenager. Really. And I think I was, well, kind of uncool. I was actually a cheerleader, which was totally not cool in the late 80s and early 90s. I wore acid-wash jeans and shoulder pads and penny loafers, which were cool. Then.

So when I tell you that this new Wal-Mart thing is uncool, I should know. Because it looks a lot like me, in 1987. That girl on the left here, in one of the videos on Wal-Mart's new The Hub social networking site for teens, she looks eerily like my best friend, Courtney. Wearing the exact same clothes. Let me say this: in 2006, that is not a good thing.

No, Wal-Mart isn't showing video from the 80s. It's trying to become some cool locale for tweens and teens. You know, where they can discuss fashion and music and -- well, probably not sex. As Brian White pointed out last week, there are so many rules about what teens can do with the home pages the company hopes they will create on the MySpace-type The Hub, why would any cool, edgy teen want to play here? To show off their facility navigating the fashion wasteland of the retail giant's stores?

According to Bob Garfield of Advertising Age, "If well-executed, such an effort might cultivate individual users, gather market intelligence on the group, destigmatize Wal-Mart as a declasse purveyor of unfashionable clothing and establish a beachhead on the web for the fast-approaching digital future ... [but] it's totally not well-executed. It's the most not-well-executed ever."

"We shouldn't tuck anything in, it's so not cool anymore," says the pink-tee and acid-wash-jeans clad "Ashley" on her featured video (clearly not produced, or written, by a teenaged girl named "Ashley"). Nope. And neither are you, Wal-Mart.

MySpace may be the space of the moment, receiving praise, aplomb and (most importantly) generating traffic to Google in ever-greater numbers, but it's not even the middle of the social network craze. Really, the whole social network effect, as a theory and a technological practicality, started with the personal web sites of the early nineties. Personal web sites beget blogs beget networking sites like Orkut and LinkedIn beget MySpace, AIM Pages, YouTube, and whatever's to come next.

Thanks to a effort by white shoe management consultancy McKinsey to get the great minds of YouTube, Yahoo! and the like together with the old garde of the gigantic media (and I'm asking myself, and Aaron Cohen of Bolt Media, who was interviewed as a person of knowledge for the Financial Times piece: whither side of the old/new divide does Time Warner fall?), social networking is now coming into the good graces of the giants of Wall Street and Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all those places where fashion and money meet the people.

Robert Young, writing for GigaOm, calls MySpace the "it girl," and describes the infatuation with "her" and her groupies this way: "nearly every media company and venture capital fund on the planet is out on the dance floor stumbling over one another to see if they can identify the next breathless social networking beauty."