No tweets at work

After the MEA ban on Twitter at the workplace, we check if companies in Bangalore are more liberal

Minister Shashi Tharoor is not the only one who has had to give up tweeting from work after the Ministry of External Affairs' ban on the social networking site.

Most software organisations in India follow a similar HR policy. They do not provide access to either Facebook, Orkut or Twitter as a preventive measure against leakage of classified information and cyber crimes.

Easy way out

"First of all, they are distractions and hamper productivity. Secondly, the organisations or employers have no control over the opinions, or information shared on such a public platform," said Rajshri D, HR manager in a software firm.

Although HR policies in large MNCs and software companies are well defined, they are not necessarily exhaustive. While protecting confidential information, conflict of interest, sexual harassment and defamation are part of the policy, issues such as cyber bullying and penalties for misusing such sites are not commonly within its purview. Companies, therefore, aren't willing to take a chance. They take the easy way out ban what is not in their control.

No complaints

And no one's complaining. After all, you wouldn't want to bark up the wrong tree or end up with egg on your face in the office. Most Twitter users are mature enough to know what is acceptable and what isn't on such a public space.

"It's open to the world. Your boss can go and see what you're tweeting about. And if it's not so diplomatic, you can get sacked," said Ronita Dutta Sachdev, senior consultant in a PR firm.

Smita Sarkar, an advisory learning specialist with a software major, agrees. "I think you can't tweet that you're having a horrible day at work and would like to kill someone," she said. If colleagues follow you on Twitter, the discontent will be obvious to those people who shouldn't or needn't be aware of such stuff, she explains.

But then, that's true of all social media. Everything's open to everyone. So, one has to use one's common sense when it comes to blogging, tweeting or using any networking site.

Exception

It's, of course, different if the internal communications department of a company chooses to have an "official" Twitter account for commercial reasons. But even then, one must word what goes online carefully. After all, it's an area where one has very little control over how information is interpreted, disseminated or retained.

Bangalore celebs, where are you?

We checked on Twitter to see if we could catch some of our celeb citizens tweeting, but they just aren't there.

Here are some prominent Bangaloreans we were disappointed not to find.

>>Nandan Nilekani
>>Ramya
>>Narayana Murthy
>>S M Krishna
>>Kiran Mazumdar
>>Ramachandra Guha
>>Ramesh Ramanathan
>>Katta Subramanya Naidu
(IT minister)

What is tweeting?
Imagine getting regular text messages from all your favourite people in the world, be they celebrities or your buddies, updating you on what they're doing at the moment. That's 'tweeting', the latest craze among netizens, popularised by the social networking website Twitter.

Tweets are short text messages that are delivered to your 'followers' that is, everyone who has subscribed to them. You can receive and send tweets through the Twitter website or its mobile version. So next time you want to share your excitement with the world, don't shout, just tweet.