Author David Kirkpatrick at Common Wealth Club California meet traces the story of the most powerful social networking tool of our day from its humble beginnings to its role as an international phenomenon. He is in conversation with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

Pew Internet informs: Director Lee Rainie discusses the Pew Internet Project’s latest research findings on people’s use of social media (social networking sites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and, yes, even email) and how technology has affected some of the ways people learn, make decisions, and seek and offer social support to others.

On the latest expert ideas on  Nokia’s Ideas Project author and business strategist John Hagel (@jhagel) talks about how social networks are platforms of joint creation

You are what you eat and if some research is to be believed your health & lifstyle habit is also related to the friends you keep. Eat.ly is precisely what it suggests to be – a social eating site – keeps a visual record of meals you’ve eaten, encouraging healthier and more social eating. Whether you’re a foodie or a nutritionist, you’ll love eat.ly. Start tracking meals today.

The study “Chronic Diseases & The Internet” conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project studies the relationship and importance of Internet in the lives of critically ill. According to the study people with chronic health condition are less likely to use the internet but those who do are surely benefitted by the availability of health information, self-help groups and online communities. The usage gap is not the factor of interest, it’s the problem of access. Because logically a critically person is more likely to access health related information on the net compared to a healthier one. Download the full pdf version of this report from this page

When other demographic factors are held constant, having a chronic disease significantly increases an internet user’s likelihood to say they work on a blog or contribute to an online discussion, a listserv, or other online group forum that helps people with personal issues or health problems.

Living with chronic disease is also associated, once someone is online, with a greater likelihood to access user-generated health content such as blog posts, hospital reviews, doctor reviews, and podcasts. These resources allow an internet user to dive deeply into a health topic, using the internet as a communications tool, not simply an information vending machine.

Claire Cain Miller on NYTimes citing this report writes a great piece "Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill". In this article Claire talks about various social networks available for such patients and some self-initiated online activities of people with chronic conditions. One such example is of Amy Tenderich, who has diabetes, writes a blog and manages the social network Diabetic Connect from home in Millbrae, Calif.

On social networks like Facebook even if you have kept your profile very very private, people can just look at your friends list and get lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn allow people to see your pic and friends list as part of the open access for visitors. In a study “You Are Who You Know:Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks” [PDF], conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems an algorithm was tested that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The results show that certain user attributes can be inferred with high accuracy when given information on as little as 20% of the users.

[ Via Erik Hayden on Miller McCune and also cross-posted on Slashdot]

Bruce Schneier on his blog on security and security technology points to this research paper "A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users" (pdf). The paper introduces a novel, practical de-anonymization attack that makes use of the group information in social networking sites.

Abstract >> Social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Xing have been reporting exponential growth rates. These sites have millions of registered users, and they are interesting from a security and privacy point of view because they store large amounts of sensitive personal user data.
In this paper, we introduce a novel de-anonymization attack that exploits group membership information that is available on social networking sites. More precisely, we show that information about the group memberships of a user (i.e., the groups of a social network to which a user belongs) is often sufficient to uniquely identify this user, or, at least, to significantly reduce the set of possible candidates. To determine the group membership of a user, we leverage well-known web browser history stealing attacks. Thus, whenever a social network user visits a malicious website, this website can launch our de-anonymization attack and learn the identity of its visitors.

The implications of our attack are manifold, since it requires a low effort and has the potential to affect millions of social networking users. We perform both a theoretical analysis and empirical measurements to demonstrate the feasibility of our attack against Xing, a medium-sized social network with more than eight million members that is mainly used for business relationships. Our analysis suggests that about 42% of the users that use groups can be uniquely identified, while for 90%, we can reduce the candidate set to less than 2,912 persons. Furthermore, we explored other, larger social networks and performed experiments that suggest that users of Facebook and LinkedIn are equally vulnerable (although attacks would require more resources on the side of the attacker). An analysis of an additional five social networks indicates that they are also prone to our attack.

Via @steph3n | Stephen Kline