Firefox Addiction

I have done much research and gathered all the results from the lab… It looks like almost all of our patients are addicted to Twitter, Meebo, and other time killing plug-ins and add-ons in their work place. Let’s find out what the results tell us the most addictive and non-productive Firefox Plugin is.

Twitter

It’s nice to know what your friends are doing, but is it really necessary to spend every waking moment monitoring when they go to the bathroom, or knowing what they’re having for dinner, or what their least favorite song of the day is? No, it’s not.

Twitter takes the cake in killing productivity. It can help if you’re existence is based around blogging or gossiping, but if you’re the average office worker trying to get your daily tasks completed you may find Twitter to be the reason you failed.

StumbleUpon

The notorious Stumble! button has been known to destroy hours of the day without any good reason. It’s always fun to get a few random sites just by clicking a button, or even spending enough time you’re connected with people who really stumble/promote things that are worth seeing/reading.

• In reality you’re not getting much out of this and it should not be a regular practice in your workplace.
• In the web-world Stumble! traffic is low converting and does not justify the time involved for the dollars in return, in our experience anyways.

PicLens

So there’s been a lot of buzz about PicLens, heck even their site has a quote from CNET saying “Cooliris makes you a more efficient web surfer.” - When’s the last time you needed to browse through 3000 images to make your decision on the search result you needed? Doesn’t a simple Google search give you the information you wanted faster? It may not be as flashy at doing it, but last time I checked Flash isn’t the right decision anyways. It’s all about serving things to users effectively and clearly, and PicLens does not help do that.

You could pose that the neat ‘preview website’ before clicking on it, or pre-fetching pages for faster browsing makes it all worth it… but if you’ve never been a webmaster that is worried about impressions for advertising or having to pay more for server bandwidth, then you just wouldn’t understand.

Gmail Notifier

Interrupting work flow and thought flow is a sinister method of killing your productivity. Avoid your email addiction, you don’t need to check it every 30 seconds. Once an hour should be adequate, so get back to work and stop reading blogs while you wait for your email notifier to go off.

Meebo

Having an instant messenger is key to success in my opinion, and the extension of Meebo makes a lot of sense, if you’re still in high school. Why does everyone need to have instant access to your attention while you’re trying to be effective? Last we’ve seen the Meebo extension is spreading faster and faster reducing productivity and eliminating personal space along the way.