Although Social Networks are a fun way to keep in touch with friends and family, they can also be dangerous. “Posting certain photos or information on the site puts you at risk of being fired, a victim of crime, or even worse. There are computer programmes called ‘data mining’ that sweep Facebook to collect dates of birth, phone numbers, addresses etc. That’s gold dust to criminals,” according to Whitelegg, an IT security expert.

Dangers of Social Networking: Here are the 10 things you should never post and why:

1. Date and place of birth – This places you at massive risk of identity theft. They are the most commonly used security questions on password resetting sites.

2. Mother’s maiden name – A lot of sites use your mother’s maiden name to authenticate who you are. They also commonly use the school you went to as a security question.

3. Address – It again puts you at risk from identity fraud, but also from burglars and stalkers.

4. Holidays – If you post an update on Twitter saying: “Can’t wait till next Wednesday – two weeks in Hawaii yeh!” you are basically saying: “Come and rob me.“

5. Short trips from home – Again, this can put you at risk of burglary and stalking.

6. Inappropriate photos and jokes - Don’t post racy, illicit, offensive or incriminating photos. Bosses and prospective employers are increasingly looking at Facebook, Twitter and Myspace pages. Also, you might think that you’ve got a great sense of humor but your tweets can send you to jail if the federal agents mistake them for genuine threats!

7. Confessionals - These can also get you fired or haunt you for the rest of your life. Posting you are skiving work, who you are sleeping with, or doing something shameful is just dumb.

8. Phone number – Unless you want to be bombarded with unsolicited phone calls from people trying to sell you something – don’t.

9. Children’s names - These can be used by identity fraudsters or, more sinisterly, by ped0philes. It is much easier to steal a child’s identity. An adult will eventually discover something is wrong by, for example, their credit rating being affected. Children won’t.

10. Don’t post a full public profile - It won’t just exist on Facebook and Twitter, it will also go on any internet search such as Google and Bing. Only give the bare bones such as a name. Keep everything else private.

1. Watch what you say: The public nature of the social networking sites is also the most dangerous thing about them. You say (tweet, set a status message, leave a scrap, comment) something and it STAYS there till eternity, for the rest of the world to watch and judge. Being funny might be a good thing to be considered “sociable”, but what if your potential boss fails to see the humor? Extreme case in point: There were at least couple of occasions where guys had to land in jail, because the police didn’t find their tweets funny!

2. Don’t be the Sales Guy: Okay, we know. That most of us join social networking to gain something in return. So, it makes perfect sense to spam others with your affiliate links, right? WRONG! No other feeling is more irritating than the feeling of being at the cross-hair of a spam-attack. Avoid forcing your business to other people. It is considered as spamming if you try to overly promote your business. It’s just like going to a conference and handing out your business card to EVEYONE even before you are introduced. When you don’t do this in real life, then why in the social networking sites?

3. Politics and Religion: Okay, we know – it’s a free Nation (world) and everyone has right to freedom of speech blah blah blah… But the fact remains that people join social networking sites to connect with others and while doing so they prefer to leave their political view and religious beliefs behind. Obviously, they expect the same from you, as well. So stay away from strong political or religious views. Since people can have different views in these areas, it is in your best interest if you remain neutral and professional all the time.

4. Consistency is the Key: Irrespective of whether you are an average Joe, a social networking guru or a huge multi-national trying to leverage social networking to connect with its consumers, being consistent is the key to your social networking success. Social networking can take up a lot of time – agreed! But, if you get bored with it and stop updating your profile (status updates, community updates, pics, tweets, videos etc), it is just a matter of time that your friends/followers/consumers will also get bored of you and will stop following you. Make sure you make a schedule and more importantly — stick to it. Although you don’t want to spend all of your time on social networking sites, you DO want to consistently update every day and there are automated tools to help you do so.

5. Incomplete Profile: Even if you don’t feel like completing your profile page and even if you don’t think that it is important, on the contrary, it is the most important thing for your success in social networking sites. Just because of the fact that I have included this point as the last mistake, don’t assume that it is the least important of all. Your profile is where people will go to find more information about you and your business. This is the place where you should be genuinely talking about your business, and maybe even provide a link to it. If you go around adding value to forums, it is most likely that people will be interested to visit your profile, so make sure it looks impressive. Compare your social networking profile page to the home page of your blog or company website and suddenly you will start seeing more value in it.

Which of these mistakes have you committed in your social networking life? Feel free to add your own mistakes to the list via commenting.

The researchers, led by led by Robin Dunbar, have developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number“, which claimed that the size of our neocortex – the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — is too small to handle more than 150 active relationships.

He told the Sunday Times that “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world“. “People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.”

Anyhow, those looking to catch a glimpse of the work of Professor Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar, can consult one of his numerous publications, “The evolution of culture: An interdisciplinary view” on Google Books.

Professor Dunbar’s findings will be published towards the end of the year and might finally debunk the myth of Facebookers who claim to have 5000 friends or so and Twitter users with over 34,000 followers. How many friends do you have on Facebook/Twitter?

Once logged into Facebook on the Fan Video page, the app allows you to mashup a selection of eight music videos that prominently feature your Facebook profile picture. Once you make your mashup, you can either share it with your friends on Facebook or select one of your friends to be featured in the videos and share it with them.

While this is hardly an impressive or meaningful implementation of Facebook Connect, this is hard evidence that MySpace is committed to using the technology on its site. As expected and reported in December, the first implementations of Connect on MySpace are leveraging MySpace’s media content. Facebook Connect implementations have been shown to dramatically increase page views on sites with potentially viral content, so MySpace’s media content, including MySpace Music is a perfect candidate for this. The extent of MySpace’s Facebook Connect implementation should be interesting to watch as it rolls out over the course of the year.

Not a super-useful application, but is this a harbinger of things to come for MySpace? Are they ready to concede the social networking arena to Facebook? What do you think?

And it is finally official now – Google has signed a deal with Facebook to integrate data from the world’s biggest social network in the real-time search results. Considering that the two companies are shaping up to be the two major online players over the coming years (even they occupy the top 2 spots in their Alexa traffic rank), it’s understandable that a partnership, even a limited one, is somewhat surprising.

Nevertheless, Facebook is the world’s largest source for real-time information, even though Twitter gets most of the attention, and Google is the world’s largest search engine, so some sort of deal should have been expected. However, Facebook won’t be providing the bulk of its data, arguably the most important one as well, but only updates from Facebook Pages which are always public.

“We are here today to announce Google real time search,” Google fellow Amit Singhal said at a press event held near the firm’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. “Users will get results on results page as they are being produced out there. This is the first time ever that a search engine has integrated the real time Web into the results page,” Singhal said.

“MySpace and Facebook users can decide what they want to see offered at Google,” said Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer. Twitter feeds were in Google real-time results on Monday, but Facebook and MySpace updates will not be integrated until possibly as late as February of next year, according to Mayer.

These partnerships have now been formalised and are understood to be going live on Google across all English language domains (both .com and .co.uk) “over the coming days” according to a Google spokesperson.

This means that when somebody searches for a particular topic on Google they will receive real-time updates from a variety of social media sites, as well as the usual list of search results. Recently, search engines have begun to disappoint those searchers hunting for the latest updates on fast-moving stories. During last summer’s protests in Iran, for example, Google search results delivered the Wikipedia entry for Iran or a recent news article about the clashes. However, a search on Twitter showed the latest news from the people on the streets of Tehran as events unfolded.

This has led to both Google and Microsoft’s Bing, partnering with the likes of Twitter, in order to make their searches more relevant and faster. While all of these sound extremely exciting, making sure people are served real-time results when they want them will be something Google and Microsoft will both have to master so as not to provide irrelevant results.

Google is eager to have a platform in place to allow bloggers, social networks and other producers of real time online content to instantly route updates to the search engine. An aspiration is to one day be able to personalize search so that Google blends public information with private updates individuals have access to in online social networks.

“That is something we are far away from,” Mayer said. “But, in the end, you really hope that the search engines can search the Web the way you see it. If you can see it, we should be able to search it. That is our goal.”