Maybe it is a good time to check your Facebook page right now, whether your boss is around or not.

The same with Bebo, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any of your online social network profiles.

Because if you believe what a British think-tank has to say about social networking, it just might be a good thing for your employer, too.

The London-based Demos has released a report that suggests social networking sites may benefit the workplace by helping employees establish new contacts, strengthen ties with clients, or learn more about what is happening in other parts of their industry.

These same workers may use social networking sites to keep in touch with former co-workers, who can pass on useful tips and information to their former workplace.

Nurturing and hosting networks can bring benefits in terms of productivity, innovation and workplace democracy,” reads the report written by researchers Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves.

Bradwell told CTV’s Canada AM on Friday that the report “Network Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work” has probed a subject that has become an issue in workplaces in recent years, but has yet to be fully explored.

“The kind of focus of our report was looking at a lot of the very real benefits that people and organizations find from social networking,” he said. “But also to just bring out some of the challenges that might have been ignored so far.”

The report, released Oct. 29, also points to the difficulties of trying to ban such networks from the office.

It is becoming difficult to separate workers and social networking as they become increasingly intertwined, the report argues, and “smart businesses” recognize this.

“Bans on Facebook or YouTube are in any case almost impossible to enforce,” reads the report. “Firms may as well try to put a time limit on the numbers of minutes allowed each day for gossiping.”

But the report does warn that social networking can also pose problems for the corporate world: Such as online clubs and cliques that are the antithesis of what social networking is supposed to be about.

Bradwell said workplaces should keep open lines of communication about the way these sites should be used, but there is no need for “strict, overt surveillance” of the ways employees are making use of social networking.

Social networks have a large opportunity in the mobile space, but much of that potential remains untapped, according to a mobile researcher from Direct2 Mobile. Nick Lane, chief researcher of Direct2 Mobile, said networks like MySpace and Facebook haven’t fully convinced their users to migrate to mobile handsets. Both companies are making aggressive attempts though, as Facebook’s iPhone application is routinely one of the most-download, and MySpace mobile is featured prominently in the Android Market.

MySpace has about 114 million users, and Lane estimates that about 4% or 5 million users access the site from wireless handsets. “But if MySpace can eventually encourage 20% of its PC-based followers to embrace mobile as a complement to their PC-based experience, that would generate a healthy 35 million mobile users,” Land wrote.

Other studies have shown that MySpace and Facebook are the most popular mobile social networking sites, but Lane said the two may be a bit confined in the mobile space due to their business models. Neither is likely to charge a subscription fee for mobile access, and advertisers may not have much interest because the companies do not provide robust meta data.

But Lane is still optimistic about mobile social networks, particularly if wireless companies can convince half of the estimated 580 million social network users to migrate to mobile.

“290 million people paying a $3 per month subscription would generate $10.4 billion per year. Or $7.92 billion based on an ad-funded free model with a CPM of $3 on an average of 25 page impressions per user per day,” Lane wrote. “However you approach it, there is a vast untapped market just needing that little incentive to make the leap ‘over the air.’”

Another possible revenue model is location-based advertising, but MySpace and Facebook currently have location-based functionality. This potentially opens the door for companies like Loopt, Brightkite, Buzzd, and others.

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets - MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.

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Social networking is going corporate. The popular technology used by millions of people to share ideas and photos on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others is catching on at companies to improve productivity and communication among workers.

Private, internal social networks make sense as companies grapple with a slumping economy that has made travel cost-prohibitive even as workforces are spread out as never before, tech analysts say.

“Companies are asking, ‘How can we make our workforce more productive?’ ” says Kevin Martin, an analyst at market researcher Aberdeen Group.

Corporations increasingly are “exploring and experimenting” in the use of social networks to improve business operations, says Gina Bianchini,CEO of Ning, a social-networking site for businesses and consumers. It makes revenue from Google AdSenseand premium services.

“There’s been a definite shift the last two months,” she says. “There is a genuine interest now rather than a casual curiosity before.”

The biggest idea in technology is finding new ways to team up in order to capture the attention (and the dollars) of consumers. Cell phone manufacturers are joining forces with sites such as Facebook and MySpace to increase the convenience of accessing these popular social sites from mobile platforms. The new alliances are beginning to bypass the traditional avenue of partnership with mobile phone carriers, leading to a fundamental change in business plans.

The marriage of handset software and social networking sites has already proven advantageous to all parties. Perhaps the most famous example is the successful relationship between BlackBerry smart phones and Facebook, as brokered by Research In Motion software. This successful marriage will celebrate its first anniversary this month. At the time of the launch, Research In Motion CEO Mike Lazaridis said, “Facebook is one of the fastest growing web destinations among BlackBerry smartphone users and it has become an important element in the evolving fabric of personal communications.” The past year has proven this to be true in spades.

Now these romances are beginning to involve more and more manufacturers and the key social networking sites. Hutchison-Whampoa has integrated Facebook into virtually every facet of its soon-to-be-released INQ1 phone. Nokia is working hard to strike a deal with Facebook to integrate the Nokia operating system software with that social networking giant. Even smaller social networking sites are getting into the game; an iPhone app is due to be released via Apple for the up-and-coming Plurk social networking site.

These deals seem to signal a fundamental shift in the way business is done in this important mobile marketplace. There has been little if any reaction to the trend by mobile carriers such as AT & T and Verizon. After all, phone-level integration with social network sites does not get in the way of the primary carrier services. And tighter integration has been proven to increase phone usage, and therefore carrier revenues. This may be a rare win-win situation in the usually volatile and hotly contested mobile marketplace.