Was your New Year’s resolution to lose weight?

If you’re having trouble shaking the few extra kilos you gained from Christmas pudding, don’t turn to Facebook for help.

Whilst it can help you keep in touch with family and friends – or fill monotonous work days,  it might also add even more unwanted kilos with a new application by Burger King.

According to CNET news by installing Whopper Sacrifice – you just “Delete 10 facebook friends, get a free whopper”

The cons?

The friend sacrifices show up in your mini feed, so your buddies will know who you chose to sacrifice for a whopper.

The pros?

But perhaps that’s a pro, seeing we’ve all got a handful of ex-work friends and childhood neighbours cousins friends that we really don’t need to keep in contact with anyway?

I guess by sacrificing all your friends, you’ll have more time on your hands.  Maybe search for more games and apps on iTunes – you’ve got to fill up your days somehow.

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Related: Join us on Facebook

Protect your computer from virus’, worms, malware

A lot of internet surfers are still irresponsible when it comes to making sure their computer is safe from viruses.  Blissfully unaware that by not protecting their own computer, they may also be putting everyone in their contact list at risk.

So now, let’s fast forward to the current virus threat – social networking sites…

Not only do we receive a lot of messages from friends within our favourite social networking sites, but, for some reason we also tend to accept and allow messages from unknown peeps (or, “potential new friends”) – where we wouldn’t normally if they were received via email.

New worms target Facebook and MySpace users

Read threat – Kaspersky worm virus warning:

“Unfortunately, users are very trusting of messages left by ‘friends’ on social networking sites.  So the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high”, says Alexander Gostev, Senior Virus Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

Kaspersky Lab analysts are warning users that the worms are designed to upload additional malicious modules with other functionality via the Internet.

Although the worms are currently only infecting MySpace and Facebook users, the infected messages look like they contain links to video clips. When clicked on, it takes you to a false YouTube site, prompting you to supposedly download “the latest version of Flash Player”, which instead, is an executable file – the worm itself.

The sad, but true, final statement on the matter from Kaspersky:

“I’m sure that this is simply the first step, and that virus writers will continue to target these resources with increased intensity”, says Gostev.

Take action

So, please, don’t stick your head in the sand. Arm your computer with the necessary internet and virus security.

If you’re forever receiving “virus & scam warnings” via email suggesting you let all your friends in your address book know about it, be warned these are quite often false. If you’re unsure, always check a site like Hoax-slayer first – BEFORE clogging up all your friends’ email inboxes.

And – if you’re looking for more information on virus protection, why not search sites like CNET, PC World etc for anti-virus product reviews.

My personal tip is Kaspersky Internet Security, along with using Firefox 3 as your browser for better protection.

Keep yourselves clean now

Did you just “Poke Me”?!

When there is so much hype on the social networking scene, many are already feeling overwhelmed and social network fatigued.

Take for example this list – Top 10 Social Network Annoyances. Some of these sound very familiar.

I’m sure we could probably all think of a few more as well..?

(and like my previous post on the future of social networking notes – there’s so much more to come)

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And your mobile for social networking: “The Next Step”

With software and applications being built every second of every day to enhance users interface both with their mobiles, and with their online social networking sites – I guess it would be foolish not to think the next step could be to completely join the two together.

By “next step” I mean more than just using your own mobile to browse your own MySpace or Facebook profile, but ..

the ability to be notified of people in your close proximity with similar social networks or interests – and allowing YOU to access their social networking profiles.

Of course, this would also work in reverse. They could access YOUR profiles.

Now, on first instincts, it screams invasion of privacy to me, but presumably the privacy settings that, say for example, your Facebook (etc) account has, controls whether or not you can be seen/viewed/checked out by other nearby Facebook (etc) peeps.

“How will it will be used – or how might we benefit?”

If you are a little “WTF – do we need this?”, the Technology blog of Timesonline.co.uk goes into valid explanations of where this could be handy; like scoring your next job.

For those of you still thinking “why do we always need to be contactable?”, they say it should also lead to actual face-to-face social networking, instead of just computer-to-computer… hmmm!

So using your mobile to find out details about someone beforehand and deciding whether or not you want to talk to them based on their social network profile, instead of just talking to them and finding out for yourself.

Doesn’t it sound a little like judging a book by its cover?

The future of mobile social networking

You can look forward and see many ways this will be used; like

• targeted sms advertising by retailers; and
• hit-ons at the pub if you’re by yourself

But let’s also hope it means better data plans offered by our telecoms service providers!!

Mood: hopeful

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