social networks

Jared Starkey is going all out for Google broadband. The day after Google said it would provide high-speed Internet access to as many as 500,000 people around the U.S., Starkey set up a Facebook page to lobby Google to bring the service to his hometown, Topeka, Kan. Since then, Starkey has passed out bright-orange necklaces made of the kind of fiber-optic cable used to deliver fast Web connections and rallied 100 people to show up at a downtown redevelopment meeting wearing T-shirts that play on Google's motto for the broadband plan.

From Prospect Magazine:

The Internet is gaining momentum among news consumers -- but 92 percent of Americans use multiple platforms to get their daily fix of news, sports and weather. So says a new survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

According to the most recent numbers from Inside Network’s Appdata, there are currently over 82 million people - or about twice the entire population of California - playing Zynga’s social game Farmville.

Has Facebook patented the news, or at least the news feed, in social-networking environments? On Tuesday, the United States Patent Office granted Facebook a patent for "Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network." The patent is published and numbered 7,669,123.

Facebook has removed 30 prisoners' pages after complaints that they were using the social network to harass their victims. The company on Thursday removed the pages after England's justice secretary brought to Facebook's attention the taunting of victims.

Prisoners in England used Facebook accounts to make threats against victims through messages to their own group of friends, according to published reports. One well-known prisoner serving time for his involvement with the mob sent messages to his 500-plus friends saying he could not wait to see the fear in some of his enemies' eyes.

Social networks have infiltrated themselves into the lives of millions of Internet users. While some businesses have embraced the phenomenon, others are being negatively impacted by the use of social networks at the office.

Aside from distracting individuals from their everyday work and affecting companies' bottom lines, they are also negatively impacting their security.

Facebook and Twitter users are under attack by cybercriminals -- and the incidents are rising, Sophos says in its its 2010 Security Threat Report released Monday. In the past 12 months, Sophos says, cybercriminals have focused more attacks on social-network users. Spam and malware are leading the charge.

Fifty-seven percent of users surveyed reported getting spammed via social-networking sites -- an increase of 70.6 percent from 2008. And 36 percent say they have been sent malware via social-networking sites, a 69.8 percent increase.

Imagine you could delete all your personal data from social network sites like Twitter or Facebook. New software, developed by a team of young Dutch artists, now helps you take the principle of "unfriending" to a different level.

Initially, the three graduates from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam developed their tool Suicide Machine Web 2.0 to make a statement about how social networks compromise personal privacy.

 ‘Don’t text and drive, it is equal to having four drinks and driving,’ - Oprah Winfrey.