ReadWriteWeb

Are you using your real name on your social network profiles? According to the European Union's Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), that's a big mistake. A new report, published to coincide with Europe's Safer Internet Day, details the dangers of using social networks and lays out 17 "golden rules" for keeping safe on social networks. The report's authors are especially worried about the proliferation of mobile social networks and, among other things, recommend that users turn off all location-based services whenever they are not absolutely needed.

Are you goofing off on Facebook at work? As it turns out, this sort of "time theft" may be no longer be your company's top concern when it comes to social networking in the workplace. According to a new study from security firm Sophos, the real problem with social networks - and most of all Facebook - is the security risk they pose to organizations.

Opera just released its latest State of the Mobile Web report. In this report, Opera focused on analyzing the behavior of users of Opera Mini, the company's mobile Web browser. Worldwide, Facebook is the leading social network among Opera Mini users, and the social network saw its traffic from Opera Mini users increase by 619%. Twitter's global growth rate was close to 2,900%. In the US, however, Opera Mini's users are not very interested in using Twitter. Traffic to Twitter from Opera Mini users declined 21% over the course of the last year.

Websense has just launched a new security suite for the Web, a product called Defensio 2.0. The main selling point of this software is its ability to protect users from malicious content posted to their Facebook profiles. Using a combination of technologies - which include a URL category blocker, a profanity filter, an executable file blocker, and a script blocker - users can configure what content can appear on their Facebook profiles or their public pages. In addition to offering Facebook security, Defensio offers blog protection, too, supporting a number of platforms including Wordpress and Drupal.

An iPhone application released this week from a company called i-Doodz tracks those who have "defriended" you on the social networking site Facebook. Defriended, as the app is called, takes its name from the slang word that means "to remove from one's list of friends (e.g. on a social networking site)", according to Wikitionary, an open content dictionary that operates like Wikipedia for words.

The Defriended app gives you an easy way to track these defriending events since Facebook itself doesn't provide this feature - or at least that's what the app did until Facebook blocked its operation. Apparently, the social network thinks defriending should be a private matter. As of now, the app is no longer available for download in the App Store.

A study released earlier this year by Anderson Analytics looked into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Some of the study's findings echo things we've already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

Microsoft researcher danah boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today's LeWeb conference. In speaking to a room packed with more than a thousand entrepreneurs, investors and journalists, boyd explained how we tend to focus on the positive aspects of social networking services. Technologists tend to praise web publishing for its ability to encourage artistic expression and public dialogue. In contrast, boyd makes the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change.

In a late night post on Facebook's company blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a round of upcoming changes that will affect all users of the social network. Specifically, the changes focus on new privacy controls for information sharing. For those who have been following Facebook closely, the announcement doesn't deliver any new information, it only confirms some previously discussed plans. However, for Facebook's user base, now 350 million strong, the updates represent a major overhaul as to how privacy is handled on the site.

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year today and like everyone else, the organization is keeping an eye on the internet. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. I disagree with him; I think this is a very valid Word of the Year. We make our cases below and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

In our society, there's an image of a computer nerd as this sad, pale, and lonely guy sitting in the dark gazing at a glowing screen. As it turns out, that's just an image and it's far from the truth. The reality is that most technology users are perfectly well-adjusted and social creatures. In fact, those who surf the web and use their mobile phones may actually be more social and better connected to the world at large than those who don't.

New data released from Experian Hitwise reconfirms what we've known for some time: Facebook is killing the other social networks. Nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S. where they found that the visits to the site have increased 194% from September of last year to September 2009. However, it's Twitter that's seen the largest year-over-year increase in visits - during that same time period, they're up 1170%. But one of the oddest findings being reported is how the social network known as Tagged is beating out Twitter for the number three spot in terms of visits.

Originally revealed at this spring's DEMO 09 conference, the Asurion Mobile address book stood out as one of the more memorable mobile products. Still called simply "AddressBook," this social media-infused contacts application is designed exclusively for Android handsets. From within the mobile application, you not only see the profile updates and details from your friends on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Amazon, you can also interact with some of the networks themselves, posting to walls, leaving comments, etc. However, if you would rather contact your friends through more traditional means, the app lets you phone them using its built-in dialer or you can text them via SMS.

"I didn't really use Facebook that much until I got my iPhone." Sound familiar? That sentiment and variations of it has provided powerful anecdotal evidence over the past several months about the impact smartphones are having on the way people are using the mobile web to connect with others. Through the mobile phone, today's more mainstream users - those folks who don't count sitting behind a glowing screen among their favorite pastimes - have begun to interact on the mobile web, specifically the social web, in greater numbers than ever before.

A new report by Openwave provides more evidence of this trend. Their findings show that four of the top ten domains accessed via mobile devices are social networking sites. Facebook and MySpace, of course, featured prominently on that list.

Obsessed with Facebook? You're not alone. The hours you spend logging on to update your status, post photos, and make comments on friends' walls is not simply a "phase" you're going through which will end sometime soon. It's a ongoing trend affecting everyone these days and it has serious implications for the online advertising industry.

According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting "a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used," says Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights at the company's online division.

According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks, and in particular the rapid growth of Facebook, it's content sites which engage web surfers' attention the most these days - time spent on these sites is up 88% from only five years ago. That's not to say social networking community sites haven't grown too, it's just that their growth hasn't come at the expense of content. Instead, people are using traditional communication sites and services (think webmail, IM, and discussion groups) less and less and choosing to use Facebook and other social networks instead.

New Trend: Web 2.0-controlled malware?

Security researchers at Symantec recently uncovered a backdoor trojan whose spread is being dictated by commands hosted in Google Groups, Google's online discussion forums. The backdoor trojan, named Trojan.Grups, appears to be the first ever malware to use an online newsgroup as the "command and control" center for botnet communications. It's certainly the first time that Google Groups specifically has been compromised in this way. This new discovery points to what appears to be the latest trend in what you could call "Web 2.0 malware," that is, nasty computer programs that don't just spread in social networks, but actually use the infrastructure of the social networks themselves to do the spreading.

Traditionally, political participation has always been highly correlated with income and education. According to a new report (PDF), this is still holds true for those who participate in political activities online. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, online users with a higher income are still far more likely to participate in political activities online than those with lower incomes. At the same time, though, the Pew study also sees some hints that new forms of civic engagement through social media services could soon change this pattern.

Even though baby boomers make up more than one quarter of all US Internet users, and even though the majority of this group spends over five hour per week online, a new survey by Burst Media found that only 14% of boomers feel that the content on the Internet is focused on people their age. An even smaller number of boomers (9.9%) thinks that Internet advertising is focused on their demographic. With regards to social networks, most boomers also think that these sites are not focused on people their age.