Mafia Wars.\u00a0 FarmVille.\u00a0 YoVille.\u00a0 PetSociety.\u00a0 Hot or Not.\u00a0 Texas Hold 'Em.<\/p>\n
Many of you will have played, or seen updates from your friends on the above games - they represent some of the most popular applications on Facebook.\u00a0 Some of my friends talk about \"lost weekends\" with various Facebook games, where they get so involved in online play, hours or days go by without pause - and as a result, my news feed is peppered with evidence of their progress in this month's hottest game. Yesterday, with the latest content update for our next-generation firewalls, we refined our control of one of the social networks - Facebook - to include additional control over applications.\u00a0 So customers can, in firewall policy, control access to Facebook as a whole, but also Facebook Apps, Facebook Chat, and Facebook Mail independently.\u00a0 Meaning that enabling Facebook for business purposes (the aforementioned inbound and outbound marketing benefits, the customer touch benefits, etc.) is even easier.\u00a0 Furthermore, the fine-grained control over certain elements means that organizations can, if they so choose, eliminate access to huge productivity sinks - like all of the various Facebook games.\u00a0 For example, an organization could enable marketing and sales folks to have access to Facebook and Facebook Mail for marketing and customer interaction purposes, but disable access to Facebook Chat and Facebook Apps for productivity reasons.\u00a0 So in my example, the people that needed the application for business reasons have exactly what they need, but the organization is not carrying unnecessary risk.<\/p>\n Besides, if I see one more message my news feed about FarmVille or Mafia Wars, I think I'm going to have to \"ice\" somebody...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mafia Wars.\u00a0 FarmVille.\u00a0 YoVille.\u00a0 PetSociety.\u00a0 Hot or Not.\u00a0 Texas Hold 'Em. Many of you will have played, or seen updates from your friends on the above games - they represent some of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,25],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-application-control","tag-social-networking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":764,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757\/revisions\/764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nWhile many organizations work to embrace social networks to better get their message out, reach new and existing customers, burnish their brand, and discover trends - social networks present significant risks.\u00a0 We've discussed<\/a> the risks extensively (and so have our customers<\/a>), and have postulated that to enable business, and mitigate risk, organizations need a lighter touch - beyond just block or allow<\/a>, to include limit by function, limit by user\/group, scan for threats\/confidential data, or shape (throttle, prioritize).<\/p>\n