Yes, Internet can be informative, interesting, funny, unique, shocking and even a time waster. I am the prime example where I end up wasting time more than doing useful. Its very easy to get distracted while working online. Here I list some of the prime time wasters available on the internet:
- Social networking Communities – I will reason this as the biggest time waster. Thankfully, I don’t use them. Orkut is the biggest of them. And adding more are Facebook and MySpace.
- Forums – Yes sometimes they can be a timewaster. Once you start browsing, it gets difficult to leave a forum. For me Digit Forum is addictive.
- Messengers – They can be distractive. But thankfully they have a option of being invisible.
- Firefox – Don’t be surprised. Firstly I am not pointing Firefox as singular. But I am pointing to all tabbed browsers. And unfortunately there are only limited non-tabbed browsers available. So If you are working, I would suggest you to use IE 6. Its so easy to browse sites using tabs, that I get carried away and the original useful tab gets lost.
- Emails – Well, if you are the type who get a lot of forwarded funny mails, this can also contribute to a time waster on the net. Thankfully, I am not a part of such a group.
So what are the things which waste your time? And how do you manage to deal with them? I would love to hear your side.
PS: I have not linked to any site mentioned in the post. Do I need to? Else you will visit the sites and keep time wasting. 
Your post is great but doesn't get into any specific sites, one that I've found just a few days ago is called (not sure if I can post this) http://www.onepageoneworld.com. Talk about wasting hours on this site. It's full of tiny little pictures, more than I've ever seen on one site. I have to be careful cause I've gotten into the habit of looking at it at work.
Yes, there’s alot of things that can be labeled as time wasters on the internet, but they are interesting and we like them, so we don’t see them as real time wasters. More like mind absorbers.