Top 10 workplace time wasters

3. YouTube

Shaun Nichols: Now we're getting into the really hard stuff. YouTube seems pretty harmless at first. A news blooper here, a skateboard crash there. But those seemingly brief videos add up.

That's how YouTube works. You check one quick clip, perhaps you follow a link from another page. But 2-minute clip links to a 4-minute clip, which links to a 3-minute clip. It can lead to a huge waste of time.

Sure, you just go to check a funny clip of a chimp or relive Joe Montana's epic touchdown pass to Dwight Clark, and the next thing you know you're waist deep in the complete collection of "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat" videos.

Iain Thomson: YouTube suffers from the same problems as Wikipedia - once you start clicking it's difficult to stop.

While YouTube is great for finding clips of TV shows you haven't seen since you were a young sprog, and rehashed highlights of news events throughout the last few decades it has a serious business purpose as well. V3 posts some of its videos from the site as a way of reaching a wider audience and so do many others, but the same problem remains with that devilish box in the right hand corner of the page covering Related Videos.

A case in point. I'd never seen Montana's pass, so popped over to YouTube to check it out. That then led to watching three more clips and oh, would you look at the time. Great pass mind you.

Whether or not YouTube will stay as used in years to come remains to be seen. The system is already creaking under the strain of funny cat videos and poorly made rants about everything under the sun. I suspect a clean out is in order, and it won't be a moment too soon.

2. Twitter

Iain Thomson: Oh, we fought long and hard over the top two spots for this list. I wanted Twitter for the number one spot but after a long and impassioned argument Shaun won me round.

I was, and to a lesser extent remain, a Twitter sceptic. While I can see it's usefulness in some respects, and now use it regularly, there's a very clear line between useful tweets and the useless ones. In practice about 90 per cent of what you see on there is rubbish, and I have much sympathy with the Twitter Cops and their slogan "No-one cares!"

It also can be highly annoying. A friend of mine in the UK sent out a tweet every two or three minutes for the length of one episode of 'The Apprentice' and by the end of it I was ready to hop on a plane and head over to cut his fingers off. But to stop following his tweets would have been an insult. It's a whole new area of netiquette where the rules have to be worked out.

So while I'll carry on tweeting I'll limit it to important or amusing stuff only. Life's too short for that kind of time sink.

Shaun Nichols: Twitter starts out with the seemingly harmless question of "what are you doing right now." Seems like a simple idea, but a trip to the local pub will show you just how ingenious of a concept Twitter is.

Go to the pub and ask everyone you see "how are you doing right now?" Some people will respond with a short grunt. Others may threaten you with violence, but a portion of the people will launch into an extended rant about their day and what they are going to do later and what they think of so-and-so.

Twitter was designed for that third group of people. And on the internet there are enough of them to drive a ton of traffic to the site. Even worse, many of those chatterbox types are in the media, meaning that Twitter gets even more hype as the "next big thing" because its addicts are all the ones presenting things. Just look at the coverage when Twitter went down - if you believed some news outlets you'd have thought the world was falling apart.

Okay, so the company may not have much of a business model, but it's hard to criticize the underlying concept behind the site and its effect on a very large portion of the internet population.

1. Facebook

Shaun Nichols: We really went back and forth on this one, neither Iain or myself could decide between Twitter and Facebook. Eventually Facebook won out, but only by an eyelash.

In the end Facebook took the top spot because it offered more ways to waste time. In addition to sharing links and posting your latest thoughts, the social networking site also allows you to post picture galleries and now supports the creation of quizzes and mini-games.

In other words, Facebook is a one-stop shop for just about every possible method for wasting time. By the time one gets done with the daily Facebook ritual it's usually time for lunch.

Even after checking up on your friends photo galleries and oversharing the events of the past week via the status box, you still have to check for wall comments and take the "which 18th century Eastern European playwright is your love match?" quiz. It just never ends.

Iain Thomson: It was Shaun's argument about the many ways that Facebook invites us to waste time that won over the day and I think now it was the right decision.

Facebook is marvellous in lots of ways. It has reconnected me with old friends I haven't seen in years, it's used by businesses to get across their messages and keeps friends and family up to date.

But in other ways it's an enormous waste of time. Shaun's mentioned the quizzes but they are just the tip of the iceberg. There's online poker, 25 things you never knew about me exposes and the endless rounds of pokes and presents to be given. Call me a cynic but if you're going to buy me a drink don't do it virtually. I want a frosty glass on the bar beside me or bottle of good Scotch in person please. And if you really want help with pirates call the British navy, not me.

Facebook is a victim of its own success. As more and more people pile into the system application developers are following them, the average person's profile is becoming stuffed with add-ons and the amount of time needed to service them grows. Here's a hint. Once a month go through your profile and delete every application you haven't used - it makes life a lot more simple and efficient.