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.

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be.

Lately, quite a few TV channels - like CNN - have replaced their man-on-the-street interviews with the cheaper solution of just doing a Twitter search and displaying the results on TV. Curatorr's mission is to help these media companies make the process of finding tweets to put on air even easier. Developed by Wiredset, the company behind Trendrr, Curatorr gives media companies, brands and publishers an easy way to find tweets and put the best of them on air.

Last September, Google launched Sidewiki, a Web annotation service that makes it easy to annotate any page on the Internet. Sidewiki, however, hasn't attracted a lot of users yet and the public discussion about online content continues to happen in comments and on Twitter.

Are you suspicious of those sexy avatars and "marketingbizpro" accounts following you on Twitter, but don't have the time or inclination to block and report them one by one as they pop up?

We've just found a new, completely free app that will zap those bots and bad users in just one click. It's fully customizable, so you can tell the blocker what you personally consider to be a spam account. And you can choose to simply unfollow those users, block them or report the accounts to Twitter, as well - again all with just one click. StopTweet is definitely one of the more useful apps we've seen lately, and it also helps us all do our part to clean up the Twitter universe.

Every day, hundreds of tweets fly past our eyes with links to important articles, meaningless drivel and the occasional self-promotion. There's little, if any, way to tell what's important and what's not. Feedtrace has stepped in to try to fill this void and let you know what people are linking to that you might care about.

For ways to harness the beast that is our Twitter stream, Feedtrace may have just stepped in as an addition to the daily toolbox.

Seesmic just launched a new version of its Android app, which, among other things, now offers support for multiple Twitter accounts and cross-posting from different accounts. The Seesmic team also worked hard on polishing the app's user interface and added a number of minor new features like extra large font in the app and the ability to change your Twitter password from within the app. Seesmic for Android now also remembers your scroll position in the timeline.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've discussed the use of third party APIs when building an integrated online product, highlighting the disadvantages such a decision could entail. One topic on the flip side of that is the question of whether providing an open public API versus a closed private one is in your product's best interest. Massively viral services like Twitter have rapidly expanded their capabilities and brand awareness by releasing an open API for third party developers to build on, but for companies in fledgeling industries, like mobile augmented reality, the API decision isn't as clear.

If you've ever spent any time trying to parse through your list of Twitter followers, than you know how time consuming it can be. "Who's this guy?" you ask yourself, as you open up their profile in a new tab, just so you can read their little blurb about who they are and what they do and why you care.

Twitter's latest feature, Hovercards, will offer that contextual information without making you ever open up another tab.

The iPad clearly dominated the discussion on Twitter over the last few days, but in the early days of January, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Lady Gaga, Avatar and the Cincinnati Bengals were among the most hotly discussed people and topics on the popular microblogging service.

Social Media monitoring and analytics service Sysomos analyzed over 100 million tweets from January 1 to 15. Overall, the company looked at topics in six different categories: people, locations, film, business, sports and miscellaneous entities.

The Westboro Baptist Church, home of the best known anti-gay protest organization in the US, led by Pastor Fred Phelps, has a new target for its public outcry. This Thursday afternoon the organization will be picketing outside the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

NBC Bay Area reporter Jackson West unearthed the schedule for the group's trip to the Bay Area and writes that after a day of protesting outside Jewish organizations, the congregation will travel to Twitter's brand new office.

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.

With new jobless claims rising unexpectedly, desperate job seekers can use any tool they can get. If you've ever spent any time job hunting, then you know how quickly those wanted ads can get filled, especially these days. What you need is something to let you know about job listings the second they're posted.

Earlier todayTweetDeck announced it has partnered with Twitter-based job search engine TwitterJobSearch, and together they've created JobDeck, a specially branded version of TweetDeck that will happily "ding" at you every time a new job listing is posted on Twitter.

Whether we're tweeting the minutiae of our daily lives from our cell phones, checking out the latest band pages on Myspace, chatting with friends on Facebook, looking up old high school buddies on Classmates or networking with colleagues on LinkedIn, we're spending more and more time on social networking sites than ever before. Leading the pack, of course, are the usual suspects: Facebook and Twitter.

As a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, we're spending 82% more time on social networking sites than we did just a year earlier.

A recently discovered security flaw in Twitter's Flash-based website widget may have allowed attackers access to the login credentials of any Twitter user. According to Mike Bailey, an analyst at Foreground Security, the problem involves a known vulnerability in Adobe's Flash programming language, the language used to code the Twitter widget. In response, Twitter has disabled the widget in question while they research the issue further.

It's often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company's categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey - Mark and Ev are right behind you.

Twitter's Suggested Users List (SUL), a longstanding and much-disputed feature of the popular microblogging app, has finally bitten the dust.

In its place, we have an interesting method for suggesting accounts for new users to follow, this time based on categories of interest instead of a hard-and-fast, limited crew of A-listers and Internet-famous microcelebs. New users will now be given options to select accounts to follow based on their defined interests, their Web-based address books, and via search. It's been a long time coming, but we think this new method will work much better for the general population as the service continues to scale into mainstream use.

When we first looked at Spredfast, the social campaign management tool launched today by Austin, Texas-based Social Agency, we thought it looked like a less-flashy version of TweetDeck. Our first question to co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill was actually how the two programs differed and they took it in stride, given how far off the question really was. With big names like IBM, AOL, Cisco, Intel and Porter Novelli using the service, you better bet it does more than manage a handful of social networking accounts and microblogging services.

Spredfast wants to be a new player in the field of social campaign management, and it is set to compete with other big names like Objective Marketer and Radian6.

Seesmic just announced the launch of Seesmic Look at an event in New York City. Seesmic Look, which is a Windows-only product, is anything but your standard Twitter client. Seesmic Looks is targeted at mainstream users who would normally be intimidated by the complexity of standard Twitter clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck.

As we reported last week, groups of hackers from all around the world got together this weekend to find ways to help Haiti and to create tools that can be used in future disasters. One of these groups, in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.