Blocking Facebook!

Craig Graham, Daniel Butterworth, Phillip Slater

An IT company is carving out a niche blocking out social networking sites like Facebook for worried Rochdale companies, schools and youth centres.

Yellowgrid Technology Solutions has seen a rise in the number of companies and organisations contacting them about ‘content filtering’ software, which can block access to certain sites from computer networks. The company has recently employed an extra engineer Phillip Slater to help cope with growing demand.

Yellowgrid, set up by engineers Danny Butterworth and Craig Graham, has blocked social networking sites for a number of companies, schools and centres for young people including Spotland Study Centre in Rochdale. 

Mr Graham explains: “Businesses are finding they are losing money because their staff are spending up to several hours a week on these sites. They are quite addictive and a few minutes here and there add up, but to the employer it is almost impossible to find out how much time their staff are spending on them because it looks like they are working.” 

Mr Butterworth has been asked to block Facebook and MySpace as well as sites containing certain keywords and images for a number of companies and schools. Nick Dykins, MD of Slingco in Rochdale, who manufacture steel wire rope products, said: “All our systems are computerised and it’s important that staff are able to focus on the task in hand rather than being distracted by social networking sites and games. Also, by filtering access to the internet we are reducing the risk of online dangers such as viruses and spyware which tend to reside on such sites.

“Yellowgrid were excellent, we used them because they’re a local company who we had worked with before. They knew exactly what to do and set up a system which means I can block out further sites and keywords if we need to.”

Yellowgrid recently also blocked social networking sites for Spotland Study Centre in Rochdale, which has a number of PCs used by young people. Mr Butterworth says: “For youth centres and schools, social networking sites can pose a more serious threat. There have been cases of people setting up false profiles and targeting young people, plus a lot of the content on these sites may be unsuitable for them.”

Ian Andrews, Manager of Spotland Study Centre, says: “A lot of young people use the centre and we can’t keep an eye on everything they access so we decided to block these sites for their own security. These sites can also be distracting and the young people are mainly here to work on school projects and for research work.”

Yellowgrid Technology Solutions is based at the The Old Police Station in Hind Hill Street, Heywood, working mainly with small to medium sized businesses who do not have their own IT department, as well as supporting in-house IT departments.

Their services include setting up secure computer networks, installing security and business software, and supporting businesses with IT problems, either by logging onto their computers remotely or by working at their sites.