Cuppacafe

Will Facebook Destroy Your Marriage? Who knows, but if you were to believe the report from below (from Law.com), then perhaps you had better reevaluate how you (and your spouse) spend your spare time.

Facebook It turns out that one of the most significant impacts that the rapid spread of Facebook is having on society may be ... destroying marriages?

The Telegraph reports that by reconnecting old flames and enabling new ones, Facebook is tempting to people to cheat on their partners. One law firm that specializes in divorce asserts that almost one in five petitions they process cite Facebook as a reason, as spouses are finding evidence of flirting and even affairs on the site.

The 20 percent statistic may be high as it comes from a law firm that handles divorces online, but Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, says that after hearing from his staff that Facebook was a recurring issue, he confirmed the 20 percent figure. "The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to," he says.

The article even mentions one 35-year-old woman who discovered her husband was divorcing her when he updated his Facebook status to read: "Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady."

We’ve spoken about this before, about people who are addicted to Facebook (all you Farmville freaks!), and while there are those of us who think that there is something truly wrong with those of you (us) who feel the need to plugged into the 'net for 24/7, there just might be an up side to this sort of addiction.

Consider the case of one Rodney Bradford, 19, who’s life was (quite literally) saved by Facebook. Doubt us? You shouldn’t. Turns out that his Facebook status plea from a morning from a couple of days ago demanding the immediate consumption of one of the basic food groups every human being needs to properly function in the morning (pancakes), proved to be his alibi.

Rodney was arrested on October 18 as a suspect in two crimes. He declared himself innocent and Robert Reuland—his defense lawyer—found the key to free him: "Where's my pancakes?"

That seemingly inconsequential Facebook status update proved crucial when the Californian company confirmed that someone wrote it from his father’s Harlem apartment computer, using Rodney’s user and password at around the time of the alleged crime: Saturday October 17, 11:49am.

Needless to say this alibi of Rodney’s was backed up by Rodney’s father and stepmother, who declared he was at their Harlem home at the time.

On the other side of that self-same coin, is another 19-year old man, this one from Pennsylvania, who was actually nabbed because of his Facebook obsession, after he forget to log out of his Facebook account at the scene of the crime.

Why the hell would someone stop to check Facebook on a computer owned by the person you robbing? Facebook addiction is a serious problem folks. Mark my words—its only a matter of time before some idiot felon gives a play-by-play tweet session of a crime in progress. Hell, it's probably already happened. [Mashable]

Apparently Forest Gump’s mom was right; stupid is as stupid does.

The Perfessor

When you declare your love for someone on Facebook, you're happy.

And everyone knows about it.

When you finally break up...

Yeah, yeah, I know that I just posted on this subject the other day, but now I’m reading in CNN that there are some annoying types who haunt the virtual halls of the various social media networks:

The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers

(CNN) -- Facebook, for better or worse, is like being at a big party with all your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers.
Facebook can be a great tool, and an occasional annoyance. What kind of Facebooker are you?

Facebook can be a great tool, and an occasional annoyance. What kind of Facebooker are you?

There are lots of fun, interesting people you're happy to talk to when they stroll up. Then there are the other people, the ones who make you cringe when you see them coming. This article is about those people.

Sure, Facebook can be a great tool for keeping up with folks who are important to you. Take the status update, the 160-character message that users post in response to the question, "What's on your mind?" An artful, witty or newsy status update is a pleasure -- a real-time, tiny window into a friend's life.

But far more posts read like navel-gazing diary entries, or worse, spam. A recent study categorized 40 percent of Twitter tweets as "pointless babble," and it wouldn't be surprising if updates on Facebook, still a fast-growing social network, break down in a similar way.

Combine dull status updates with shameless self-promoters, "friend-padders" and that friend of a friend who sends you quizzes every day, and Facebook becomes a daily reminder of why some people can get on your nerves.

You can go on to read the rest in the link above, but in case you are wondering, the 12 types are as follows:

• The Let-Me-Tell-You-Every-Detail-of-My-Day Bore.
• The Self-Promoter.
• The Friend-Padder.
• The Town Crier.
• The TMIer.
• The Bad Grammarian.
• The Sympathy-Baiter.
• The Lurker.
• The Crank.
• The Paparazzo.
• The Obscurist.
• The Chronic Inviter.

Which one are you (if any?)

The Perfessor

Unless you were living in a cave yesterday you missed the prelude to the end of all things.

I kid you not.

Twitter went down for several hours (and no, that isn’t code for some sexually-deviant thing) Settle down, Walt. What I mean to say is that the self-serving, ego-centric electronic posting service Twitter was unavailable to its subscribers for several hours yesterday.

According to The Financial Times, what might have been no more than a teenage prank completely knocked Twitter offline for over two hours yesterday.

The micro-blogging firm, whose service allows text and web posting of messages of 140 characters or less, said it was hit by a denial-of-service attack, in which thousands of personal computers attempt simultaneous connections, slowing the target site’s response to a virtual standstill.

According to The Wall Street Journal it was more than just Twitter that was hit, but Facebook as well (which jives with this blogger experienced, as I was having some difficulty posting, which ticked me off to no end).

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were working together with Google Inc. to investigate what happened, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person familiar with the attack said it may have been targeted at a single Russian activist blogger with accounts across the impacted services.

The New York Times indicated that Google was also targeted:

Many of Twitter’s 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours. Analysts characterized the disruption as a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers overwhelm a Web site by sending it a deluge of junk requests, and one suggested the attack might have originated in Russia or Georgia.

While it is still not clear where the attack originated, or who was behind the digital assault, it is clear that someone out there was looking to jam the rest of us up.

Oh, and that isn’t even the the worst news; apparently stats confirm that teens don’t tweet:

If you’re under 25 and use Twitter, you’re not the source of the site’s tremendous growth. While we recently questioned the findings of a largely anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley written by a 15 year old, Nielsen has now produced figures that confirm the trend: young people don’t Tweet.

So stay wary my friends.

The Perfessor

College Humor has a funny new musical video up celebrating the most popular social websites of the net, done by a couple of over stuffed singers and, uh, a few musical theater majors.

Sound req'd.

Good news boys and girls, it appears that your boss probably won’t discover that you are screwing around on company time updating your FaceBook page and blogging what an A-Hole your boss is because he’s apparently doing what he is getting paid to do.

Worried about bumping into your boss on a social media service, then having to explain some indiscrete comment you made in cyberspace? If you work for the world’s biggest companies, you can relax: Your CEO isn’t spending time on the social Web.

A survey of Fortune 100 CEOs finds that almost none of them are using Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn. Reuters:

Go figure...

You can read the rest of that report here.

The Perfessor