MySpace Medical: How to Help At-Risk Teens Online | Newsweek Health

Is Your Boss on Twitter?
6/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
A public relations executive recently evaluated the number of Fortune 100 CEOs who had presences on social network sites including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and online information site Wikipedia. Almost none of the chief executives were involved with the Internet destinations, which should not have been a surprise to anyone with sense. The question raised by the PR person is why executives do such a poor job managing their images online. A better question is why a CEO would want to be involved with the websites at all.
TECHNOLOGY
Walking the Cyberbeat
Nick Summers 5/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
It's just before lunchtime in the sunny, high-tech headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, Calif., and Simon Axten is cuing up some porn. A photo of a young couple sloppily making out pops onscreen. It's gross, but not against the rules, so Axten punches a key to judge the image appropriate. Next up: a young woman in panties only, covering her breasts with her hands. "That's pretty close," Axten says, pondering the image. There's nothing arbitrary about his judgments: at Facebook, they have developed semiformal policies like the Fully Exposed Butt Rule, the Crack Rule and the Nipple Rule. In this photo there's no visible areola, he decides, so it stays. The next photo is a male clad only in a black thong and angel wings. Utterly nonplussed, Axten OKs the picture. After delivering a verdict on 75 of the 438,848 outstanding photos flagged by Facebook users—buff guy soaping up in the shower (OK); girl blowing an epic cloud of pot smoke (he deletes it); an underage user drinking from two liquor bottles at once (ditto)—Axten is off to a meeting. It's just another day at the office of the world's fastest-growing social-networking site.
HEALTH
Out of the Shadows
Tina Peng 11/23/2008 12:00:00 AM
A Web page labeled "Ana Boot Camp" recently offered its members a seemingly irresistible proposition: a 30-day regimen designed to help them drop some serious pounds, no exercise needed. The catch was that the group's members were to vary their daily caloric intake from 500 (less than half the daily minimum requirement for women recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine) to zero. They were supposed to track their progress, fast to make up for the days they accidentally "overate" and support each other as they worked toward their common goal of radical weight loss.
SOCIETY
‘Kristen’s’ 15 Minutes
Sarah Kliff 3/14/2008 12:00:00 AM
Stationed in Afghanistan, Jordan Parks is a half a world away from New York City. But that has not stopped him from hearing about—or making his mark on—Gov. Spitzer's sex scandal. "Being in Afghanistan, all we do is watch the news, and that was all that they were talking about," says Parks, a satellite communications operator in the 82nd Airborne Division who has been stationed there since January 2007. When the identity of "Kristen" was revealed in the press, he became even more consumed by the coverage. So he logged on to Facebook—Park says it's his "lifeline to back home," and he checks his account daily—and created a group called "I don't care WHO or WHAT she did, Ashley Alexandra Dupre is effin gorgeous!!" He invited a few of his buddies in Afghanistan to join; two of them signed up. "I thought it would just be this little inside joke with my friends," says Parks, but when he checked his account the next morning, the "inside joke" had attracted more than 100 members, none of whom Parks knew. By Friday morning the membership had grown to nearly 200. "It's just wild to see how much of a news source MySpace and Facebook have become," says Parks.
How Many Friends Is Too Many?
Steven Levy
The songwriter Buzzy Linhart once said, "you've got to have friends." indisputable. But 5,000 friends? Questionable. The seeming excessiveness of that concept is part of the reason the social-networking site Facebook caps the number of friends any person can gather at that lofty figure. Yet when the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch posted recently that Facebook was about to end the limit, the item garnered a lot of attention, and even some excitement. The report turned out to be a false alarm—Facebook still maintains a 5,000-
TECHNOLOGY
A New World Order: MySpace Is Glam, Facebook Is Geek
Brian Braiker
Do you Facebook or MySpace? Increasingly, membership in one social network does not necessarily rule out the appeal of belonging to the other. Of course, each company wants you to visit their site more often than the other, if not exclusively. But both sites have been taking steps to sharpen the differences between them. "MySpace is Hollywood and Facebook is Silicon Valley," says David Card, a senior analyst for Jupiter Research. Or you could put it this way: MySpace is glam; Facebook is geek. Not that there's anything wrong with either.