Broadband Advisor

Every form of communication, from snail-mail to e-mail, chat and others, is subject to fraud and scams. But social networks like Facebook are subject to new, more dangerous opportunities for fraud.

Microblogging on Twitter is great. But sometimes you're just too busy to sit down and type that 140-character tweet. Maybe you're climbing a volcano, sprinting through the airport or running a marathon and just can't stop to type. Here's how to post on Twitter using only a voice phone call.

Leetspeak, Internet shorthand, computer jargon for instant messaging -- whatever you call them, initialisms like BRB, LOL and BTW have now entered the public lexicon. (I know a few teenagers who actually say LOL to each other in person!)

Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another.

Clever social networking-related startups with obscure taglines -- including Causecast ("Change your world, and the world will change"), Qik ("See what happens"), and Joongel ("Internet the easy way -- we have chocolate") -- line the showroom of TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. If you want to find out what these companies do, you'll have to ask the one of the beautiful people manning the tables.

Josh Quittner, writing in Time recently, explored what vendor -- Google, Apple or Facebook -- will be the next great Internet platform. It is quite a good article, but Quittner only addresses part of the conflict that is determining what tomorrow's Internet will look like.

Microsoft has decided it doesn't want Yahoo anymore. It apparently just wants to make a deal for the profitable part -- search advertising. After all, they're desperate enough to increase their market share that they are going to pay people to use their Live Search. Of course that would still leave Google as the market leader.

Drop-down menus. Tabbed browsing. A content management tool. Come on, people: it's not like Facebook is reinventing the wheel here.

There are social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and OpenSocial. There is the iPhone SDK, Google's Android, and RIM's BlackBerry. There are communications tools like Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce.

Every other day there's a story in the news of some dangerous prank or criminal activity being aired on YouTube.

The blogosphere is getting tired of all the talk about Facebook fatigue, but enterprise IT users are dealing with their own kind of exhaustion.