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This Week In Social Media: October 30, 2009

This Week In Social Media: iePlexus Oct. 30, 2009 from iePlexus on Vimeo.

This Week In Social Media: iePlexus Oct. 30, 2009 from iePlexus on Vimeo.

This week, several new virus’ have been making their rounds attacking the social networking sites Facebook & Twitter. Facebook has been hit the hardest.  The virus known as Bredolab, hit Facebook earlier this week, which sends an e-mail to users, asking them to confirm a password reset and a file is attached which contains a Trojan horse, which could severely destroy a computer. Facebook is also reporting 2 more virus’ which are working their way through e-mails asking you to do some sort of activity to your account.  Facebook has told users that Facebook would not send any attachment in an e-mail, and to check out the company’s Security Page for more tips.  Twitter’s virus comes through a direct messages containing the phase, “Hi, this you on here?” followed by a link.  Twitter warns users not to click links from users you don’t know and if you accidentally do, to change your password immediately. 

On Monday Yahoo’s GeoCities was shut down. The service that hosted the first website generation closed after Yahoo has been trying to cut costs since CEO Carol Bartz took over.  Users for Geocities have has plenty of time to save their work and transfer it to another hosting site.  Yahoo established the GeoCities Archive Team, which was designed to archive and save as many GeoCities pages as possible for selection as Internet history.

Facebook & MySpace are in talks about teaming up. On Tuesday, Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook had told a British newspaper that the two are in talks about hooking up to allow users to share video and music content through their sites.  Up until recently MySpace’s biggest competitor had been Facebook.  Myspace has one of the largest selections of music and videos on the Internet. And If users were able to share music or video onto Facebook, it would not only add to the amount of views or listeners of the content, but get Facebook users to possibly reconsider keeping or sign up again for their MySpace accounts which has been dwindling lately.

Taking time out to quickly check your Facebook, or Twitter account during the work day seems like no biggie, but a survey out of the UK this week has estimated over 2.25 billion dollars are lost every year while employees check their personal pages.  1,460 workers for the English company Morse were polled and had confessed of spending and average of 40-50 minutes a week checking their personal sites while at work.  If you take that average, by the end of the year the employee had taken roughly a weeks work of pay for free.  Many companies have expressed interest in banning social networking sites from within the company, however others argue that before social media employees took that time drinking coffee and talking around the water-cooler.

Last week we told you about U2’s YouTube Concert on Sunday night.  The band was the first to broadcast a concert live via the internet and the LA Times reports that the show generated 10 million live streams in 17 countries.  YouTube is calling the U2 Concert the largest event in the company history, and also hinting at bringing more live concerts to the site. 

It’s hard to believe but Thursday marked the 40^thanniversary of the Internet.  On October 29, 1969 Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer science professor had set up the Internet by sending part of a message from UCLA’s host computer to Stanford’s Research Institute.  After that, it the took 12 years to get 213 computers connected to the Internet. Today there are over 1.7 billion computers connected to the Internet that number has more than tripled since 2001 when there were only 513 million computers connected to the World Wide Web.