The same question people used to ask about PCs can be asked of social networks: Were our lives easier or harder, better or worse, simpler or more complex, before they came around? The answer is yes. For some folks, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem nearly as indispensable as e-mail, but creating and maintaining these virtual circles of friends turns out to be quite a bit of work, often unnecessarily so. Here are the 10 things that bug me most about today's social networking services.

10. MySpace KitschUnlike Facebook, which adheres to a relatively rigid blue-on-white, three-column design, MySpace lets you decorate your page with background images, themes, and unconventional layouts. That flexibility provides just enough rope for many MySpacers, and the results range from ugly to completely unreadable. Some MySpace pages are so poorly designed that they can crash the hardiest browser--and this alone has caused many social networkers to flee the aesthetic chaos of MySpace for the relative calm of Facebook. Thankfully, some enterprising script authors have come up with scripts that tone down the MySpace bling and clutter: One of my favorite MySpace scripts puts a button on the screen that turns custom page styles on and off with a single click.

9. The Worms Crawl InOne of the benefits of social networking is that your communications with fellow networkers bypass your normal e-mail inbox, providing a measure of safety against viruses, worms, and other malware -- or so everyone thought. In 2006, however, Google's Orkut service (which is hugely popular in Brazil) was hit by the MW.Orc worm, which masquerades as an image file in a user's scrapbook and propagates to the profiles of other users, stealing personal data along the way. Despite attempts to block such infections, a new family of worms written in JavaScript attacked the service in late 2007, and the problems continue today. Of course, the issue isn't confined to Orkut; we've heard numerous stories of social networkers catching bugs from social networking sites outside Brazil, too.

8. LinkedIn Is UpTightAlmost anything goes on MySpace, but not so on LinkedIn, where the strictly-business motif discourages personal expression outside of a photo (a fairly recent innovation), a status line, and standard résumé entries. Sure, the whole point of LinkedIn is to put your most professional foot forward, but really, LinkedIn, couldn't we loosen the necktie just a little? LinkedIn may never support psychedelic backdrops or party photos, but it could do a lot more to help you project something more than an utterly antiseptic persona.

7. Mobile Social Networking Still Kinda WeakImagine receiving real-time, location-based status messages from your friends as they make the rounds of the local bars and restaurants. Although Facebook, MySpace, and other services are gradually adding mobile-phone features, that kind of mobile social networking is still just a dream for a number of reasons. First, to be successful, it has to work across multiple wireless carriers and social networks--no easy feat. Second, services such as Dodgeball require you to actively post location updates before your friends can find you. Until GPS-equipped phones can update networks with location information automatically, it's still easier just to call.

6. Ning: Too Much PornNing, which lets you set up your own custom social network, has attracted attention for its ability to create communities that are more functional than those created through competing services from Google and Yahoo. Nonprofits, support groups, and hobbyists have found their homes on Ning. But, as with many new neighborhoods on the Web, the seedier side of the culture is often the first to move in. As on Second Life, pornography reportedly comprises a significant percentage of the communities Ning hosts. Flickr faces a similar issue, but it shields unsuspecting visitors from seeing adult content through default filters (that is, you must actively opt out of the filter). Ning offers no such setting, which makes the site tough to recommend to schools and families.

5. Do I Know You?Facebook started out as a way for college students to put faces to names: "Hi, I think we took Poly Sci together last semester, and you're friends with my friend Brittany. Would you be my Facebook friend?" Now that Facebook is a global phenomenon, exchanges can go more like this: "I don't know you, and we have no friends in common. I live in Colorado, you live somewhere far away. And yet you'd like to be my friend and show me your baby pictures. And you want to see mine. Hmmm, let me think about that ... request denied." Not only is it okay to ignore friend requests from people you don't know, your privacy may depend on it.

4. Thanks for the Add! Here's Some SpamSlightly more annoying than random friend requests from total strangers is the increasing presence at social networking sites of good old-fashioned spam--you know, the kind where somebody is actually trying to sell you something. On Facebook, MySpace, and many other sites, you can expect to receive all kinds of unsolicited commercial and noncommercial requests, promos, and e-mail messages in your inbox. All manner of enterprises, from fledgling rock bands to escort services to professional headhunters, are trying to use these newfangled social network things to drum up business, and that means spam.

3. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (Too Hard)Late last year I realized that I'd read one too many inspirational peace, true love, and happiness-through-vegetarianism bulletin posts from some random friend on MySpace, and I decided that I'd had enough. I decided to cancel my account. I wanted to disappear from the scene--to commit "MySpace Suicide." But I quickly found out that it wasn't as easy as clicking a Delete Account button. Perhaps to protect accounts from unauthorized deletion, some services require you to send a formal cancellation request--LinkedIn requires you to contact customer service, for example. MySpace does let you delete your own account, but only if you still have access to the e-mail account you used to set it up. Unlucky for me, I had changed ISPs during my two years of MySpace membership, and I no longer had my old e-mail address. So began a four-week account-cancellation process, culminating in my actually having to e-mail MySpace a picture of me holding a piece of paper with my MySpace user name scrawled on it. I might have been better off just leaving the account active and deleting all the data and content it held.

2. Zombies, Pirates, and Other Pointless Facebook ApplicationsFacebook applications allow my friends to share their movie tastes, opinions, news picks, and other items with me, but accepting these tidbits requires me to install each corresponding app in my own profile (at which point it has access to my personal information). One app informs me that a friend has just urinated on me, poked me, or vampire-bit me. An alarming number of my female friends want me to know them by their stripper names. Why my friends devote so much time to these curious little apps I haven't figured out, but I know that cumulatively they've begun to demand way too much of my time.

To make matters worse, Facebook applications promote themselves, too, trying to get in touch, and even peppering me with spam. If you're encountering the same thing, you can fight back. To make silly apps go away, open the application invitation and click on the Block [application name] link in the bottom-right part of the window. Or, you can banish all applications from your Facebook experience by installing the Facebook custom app hider Greasemonkey script.

1. Multiple Social Network Syndrome (MSNS)With the advent of social networking, my e-mail traffic has gotten worse, not better. Here's an e-mail telling me that my brother has sent an e-mail within Facebook. Another message informs me that Susie has updated her profile at Friendster. Another announces that Bob over at FriendNet has just brushed his teeth. Another proclaims that Dave has written the latest installment of his ingenious blog at MySpace. Somebody at Facebook has just poked me. Someone else has bought some new bling. And on and on and on. To reply or act on any of these events, I'll have to bring up one of the 12 social networks I've been sucked into joining, log in, and then view the ads there. All of that, of course, necessitates a lot of extra clicks and keystrokes, and after a while, I find that I don't really like my friends anymore.

The major social networking sites are very aware of such frustrations, and are taking steps to increase their ability to interact with one another. MySpace recently announced that it will let its users push their bio information out to other sites such as eBay, Photobucket, Twitter, and Yahoo. Not to be outdone, Facebook has announced its own plans to do the same thing with partner sites.

That's all good, but I'm not holding my breath for the day when I can share data and content directly between my MySpace account and my Facebook account. Still, it's a positive sign that the big players are acknowledging that social networking is about bringing folks together online, not confining them inside large walled gardens.

PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

T-Mobile USA will provide Yahoo's OneSearch search engine on its phones, a Yahoo executive said Wednesday.

T-Mobile is placing a OneSearch button on its phones in a deal that is to be announced soon, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president and head of Yahoo's Connected Life Division, at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The carrier's decision to place a OneSearch button in the software of its subscribers' handsets is a much-needed win for Yahoo as it struggles against Google and Microsoft for search advertising dollars and looks for a successor to outgoing CEO Jerry Yang.

[ Take InfoWorld's guided tour of T-Mobile's G1, the first phone to carry Google's Android operating system. | Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Yahoo's latest partner has a close relationship with Google in at least one area. Last month, T-Mobile USA became the first mobile operator to offer a phone based on Google's Android software platform when it put HTC's G1 handset on sale. T-Mobile could not immediately be reached for comment, and Yahoo's Boerries didn't say specifically whether the OneSearch button would appear on the G1.

Yahoo let Google take away most of its market share in PC search and is working with carriers to make sure the same thing doesn't happen in mobile, Boerries said. So the company is working through mobile operators to get OneSearch set up on their phones in hopes that subscribers will go straight to Yahoo's search engine rather than calling up a competitor's, he said. Yahoo has deals with 26 mobile operators around the world, which have 850 million subscribers, he said.

OneSearch is available by download to users of many phones. However, since mobile users traditionally don't download applications to their phones often, Yahoo can reach more users by preloading the button on their phones.

In March, T-Mobile in Northern and Central Europe dropped Google search for Yahoo, and the U.K. carrier O2 also is a partner, Boerries said. Those deals have helped Yahoo gain a market share of 25 percent in Europe and more than 30 percent in the U.K., he said. The company had "lost all footprint on search" on PCs in Europe, he said.

OneSearch is designed to return useful answers, instead of just a series of links, for easier use on mobile devices, and earlier this year was opened up to allow content from third parties such as reviews site Yelp. Voice search, which just this week became available from Google as an iPhone application, already was available for OneSearch, Boerries said.

In 2009, Yahoo will concentrate on making it easier for advertisers to set up effective mobile advertising, Boerries said. For example, it's hard to make ads look good on a wide variety of mobile devices, and Yahoo wants to help solve that problem, he said. The company is exploring how to give advertisers the tools they need to create the right ad experience for consumers and to reach as many people as they want without having to make deals with many operators, he said.

Mobile search advertising has to be built from the ground up, and not all Web search advertisers will want to make the leap, Boerries said.

Advocates for the Ruby programming language on Wednesday hailed its usefulness as an enterprise application development option, especially in a down economy.

The Merb framework for Ruby also was championed, during a session at the QCon conference in San Francisco. Speakers also defended Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework against critics citing slow performance and scalability problems.

Ruby serves as an alternative for companies seeking more affordable software development, said speaker Greg Pollack, CTO at Rails Envy, which offers Rails-related services.

"With Ruby, I can write less code to do more things, and I can probably give them a more affordable option," offering a smaller initial investment and less risk, Pollack said.

Rails applications can be scaled via techniques such as the memcached application, Pollack said in an interview after his presentation. "Really, the way you scale Rails is just like you scale any other Web app," he said.

Ruby reaches beyond the Web, Pollack said. It is being used to generate music and to maintain Linux boxes, as well as for graphics and desktop clients, he said.

Merb, which is based on Model View Controller (MVC), offers an option to the widely known Rails framework, according to speaker Matt Aimonetti, a Merb evangelist.

"Merb meets the enterprise needs because of the cost, adaptability, and scalability," said Aimonetti, who nonetheless defended Ruby on Rails in benchmark tests he detailed. Aimonetti said he tested it against other frameworks such as the PHP-based CodeIgniter. Rails scored 88 requests per second (rps), while CodeIgniter was 98.2 rps, he said.

"Really, Rails is not that slow. It's actually pretty close to the fastest PHP framework," Aimonetti said.

Ruby, meanwhile, is fast in real-life Web benchmarks, he said. "Ruby as a language might be a bit slow, it's true, but when you use it on the Web, it's actually fast," said Aimonetti

Merb, he said, is "very suited for the enterprise world but not only [the enterprise]." It is "the fastest Ruby framework we have right now," Aimonetti said.

The technology offers the concept of Merb "slices," which serve as stand-alone miniature applications that can be mounted inside other applications, he said. Merb offers modularity and flexibility, said Aimonetti.

Merb 2.0, due within a year, will feature optimization in how requests are served and also target rapid prototyping.

Toshiba Storage Division? announced a breakthrough half-terabyte hard disk drive in a 2.5-inch form factor on Wednesday.

The mini-drive is targeted for inclusion in mobile devices by OEMs.?

The high-capacity drives are expected to enhance the capabilities and thus the interest in the new class of sub- and mini-notebooks coming into the market.

Toshiba Model MKxx55GSX? will most likely also be included in game consoles and printers.

The drive might also be designed as an external storage devices if an OEM is willing to wrap a plastic shell around the drive, add a connector like USB, and sell it as an external storage device. Weighing only 3.6 ounces as produced by Toshiba even with the additional weight of an external shell, the device could be easily packed in carry-on luggage.

Although the units will ship in volume in December, OEMs may not have products incorporating the devices until the spring.

The Serial-ATA 2-platter drive features 8MB of buffer memory, 3Gbps transfer rate, and a rotational speed of 5,400 RPM.

Additional drives using the same form factor in the product line will include 400GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB, and 120GB models.

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.

It's part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the online spam-filtering service based on the Postini technology Google acquired last year. "We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save," said Adam Dawes, a Google product manager.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

To figure out the cost of spam, you enter things like the number of workers at your company, how much you pay them, how much spam they have to deal with, and presto: Google figures out how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Of course it also tells you how long it would take for Google's service to pay for itself at your shop.

For companies doing their spam-fighting in-house, there's also a "Total Cost of Ownership" calculator to show how inexpensive Google thinks its service really is.

Last year, Nucleus Research reported that spam costs U.S. companies $712 per employee each year. A $31,000-per-year employee spending 16 seconds each on 21 spam messages per day would cost about this much, according to Google's calculator. That adds up to about $70 billion per year in lost productivity, Nucleus said.

While Google may be helping people figure out how much spam costs, the company could do a thing or two to lower spam itself, said Richard Cox, chief information officer with the Spamhaus antispam group.

He would like to see Google do more to block spammers from using Gmail service and to start including the IP addresses of Gmail senders in its message headers. "If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you'd understand just how much this is costing the community," he said of Gmail spam.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

The November 2006 agreement has had the two companies cooperating in having Microsoft offer Suse Linux support certificates from Novell and agree not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

[ For a two-year retrospective on the agreement, featuring comments from Microsoft, Novell and an opponent of the arrangement, see The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later. ]

But the two companies are marching on with the two milestones. Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Silverlight, offering Linux users high-definition media capabilities, according to a Microsoft representative. The project is being shepherded by Novell.

Moonlight will be provided as an open-source plug-in for the Firefox Web browser, Microsoft and Novell said. The first source code for the project was released in May. The beta release will be available free of charge.

Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is due the first half of 2009.

Microsoft and Novell have collaborated on systems management to ease customers' management tasks associated with mixed IT environments, Microsoft and Novell said. Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise extends cross-platform Linux monitoring capability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. It enables management of Windows and Linux servers from a single console.

In another development in the open-source realm, Yahoo said this week that its BrowserPlus Web development technology will be offered in an open-source manner.

BrowserPlus features a plugin framework for building Web applications that contain desktop capabilities. It can be extended with JavaScript APIs to access desktop facilities.

"By releasing BrowserPlus as an open source project, Yahoo will enable open development on the platform for in-browser desktop applications across the Web," a Yahoo representative said. "This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Yahoo's hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers."

Yahoo said that the two-year-old project was a failure in some respects. The company had been looking to uncover innovative ideas in native clients applications and massage them into reusable client libraries. Yahoo was extracting good solutions to problems with wide appeal and making them easy for anyone in the company to apply, Yahoo said.

"At the end of our two-year run we had many C++ libraries, which ran on every operating system under the sun, to perform tasks ranging from the mundane (say, logging) to the exotic. To our dismay, we didn't have client teams all over Yahoo scrambling to use the stuff we built. We did, however, learn a lot from this experience," Lloyd Hilailel, of the Yahoo BrowserPlus team, said in a statement.