Finally, a Tool That Links Up Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Practically Everything Else You Do on the Web

Finally, a Tool That Links Up Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Practically Everything Else You Do on the Web - I have recently become enamored with a cool little online tool that does nothing more than link up and sync all of my social-media accounts. The Web-based service, which made its official debut last month, is called Ifttt—pronounced, satisfyingly, just as it looks. And it wants to “put the Internet to work for you”—a wonderful goal, if one that says something about the technological saturation of modern life.

Ifttt is a semiacronym for “if this, then that,” and that pretty well captures how it works. You give the service a two-part command. If I’m tagged in a Facebook photo, then add it to my Dropbox account. If I tweet, then send it to my Google+ stream. If it’s going to rain in D.C. tomorrow, then send me an email. That’s it. It currently works with a few dozen popular services, including Facebook, Google and Gmail, Twitter, and Craigslist. It also links with any site using RSS or Atom feeds, giving access to the world’s blogs and news organizations, and can reach you by email and phone.

The combinations are endless. Want a phone call if it’s more than 80 degrees in Doha? Ifttt can do that for you. It can put every David Brooks column or Michael Lewis story directly into your Instapaper account. It can also put your Foursquare check-ins on your Google Calendar, if you want to keep track of where you were or who you met with. You can hand-make new options depending on what services you use. And you can borrow other people’s best Ifttt ideas in the recipes section of the site.

Ifttt, a handy new Internet service

Even if you don’t live chained to a computer or a smartphone screen, Ifttt can still do some cool stuff to make your life easier. Say you were on the hunt for a reproduction egg chair to round out your office, and you wanted to get a sense of prices on Craigslist. Ifttt could deliver all the relevant results for a month to your email or Evernote account, so that you did not have to wade through search results every day. One of Ifttt’s creators also suggests a specific use for director-of-technology types. If you get a “server alert” message delivered to your email, Ifttt will call you, making doubly sure you know your site is down.

Of course, the more of a social-media junkie you are in the first place, the more useful the service will be—Ifttt is already a cult hit among the life-hack set. For instance, I am currently juggling Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Twitter is the only service I use consistently, every day, but I wouldn’t mind having Ifttt update the others so I can better connect with my readers and sources, and maybe even see if I should shift attention to another platform.

The service has bigger ambitions than just to be a humble widget for big social media, though. In a post introducing the then by-invite-only product, its creators noted how hard it is to bend or adapt programs and sites and apps. You could buy a car and remake it as a bathtub if you felt like it. But for the most part, if you want to use Facebook, you can only use it how Mark Zuckerberg and the app makers think you should use it. “In the more abstract digital world … even the simplest of insights [requires] years of engineering experience to successfully implement,” they write. “[O]ver the past 20 years the layman’s technical vernacular has expanded blindingly fast. At the same time, we’ve been breaking down the core unit of definable functionality into ever smaller and more digestible pieces, from monolithic operating systems, to web based applications and mobile apps.”

That seems right to me. We are assaulted with a fire hose of digital information. That digital information tends to come in many disconnected streams. (It’s not for nothing that computer users flick between screens every 97 seconds, on average.) It has gotten easier to pull out the information we want—looking just at Facebook photos, or searching for certain hash-tagged tweets, for instance. But it is often terribly hard to get the services to interact with one another.

Over the years, many companies have attempted to address just that issue. Google, for instance, is trying to become a one-stop shop, adding things like daily deals and a social network so you never need to leave its yard to play elsewhere. Facebook is doing the same, adding in a messenger and shopping functions. Others have taken Ifttt’s tack, trying to knit different services together. Take the cool, if somewhat obscure, Yahoo! Pipes, which lets you “aggregate and manipulate” content from different sites.

I am not sure that Ifttt succeeds in the Herculean task of corralling all that digital information, nor that it is really trying to. (I, for one, admit to enjoying time spent idly wandering around in my various social-media accounts.) But it does succeed in making useful little tools. Nifttty, you might say. ( slate.com )

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Seven Facebook Contest Ideas For Small Business

Seven Facebook Contest Ideas For Small Business - You’ve probably heard Facebook success stories from big brands with large budgets. They often have elaborate landing pages, TV commercials, paid blog posts, and celebrity endorsements.

What about the small business that doesn’t have thousands to spend? This list is for you.

1. Tie your contest into current events

Clothing company PLNDR gave a unique twist to the NCAA. Instead of basketball teams facing off against each other, they had brands submit T-shirt designs and let them battle on Facebook. The designer with the most “likes” moved to the next round. As a result, PLNDR's Facebook page grew 800 percent—look at their chart on this blog post.

TimetoPlayMag.com tied their contest into a holiday with a virtual Easter Egg hunt. They hid five Easter eggs on their website each day, for a total of 15 days. The first player to find an egg and click on it won a $20 Toys"R"Us gift card. All of the clues and hints to find the eggs were posted on Facebook—smart way to drive people to your site!


2. Run a photo contest

During the summer, pizza company Fresh Brothers runs contests using their mascot, the Slice (a giant slice of pizza). They tell fans where and when Slice will be at events, and if they snap a picture with the Slice and post it, they get a gift certificate as a thank you.

Wine website Snooth.com created a Facebook landing page on their Fan page using the Wildfire app—Facebook guidelines say brands should run contests like this through an app. To promote one of their Australian brand wines, they asked people to submit pictures of people showing their Australian pride. Fans posted pictures of themselves enjoying the wine and using the Australian recipes from their website. People voted on the photos, driving new exposure, and as a result, traffic continued even after the contest ended.


3. Play simple guessing games with your fans

PR firm Sammis & Ochoa runs promotions for two restaurants in Texas. The contests run every Friday at 4 p.m. CDT, which gives them a chance to prep and tell others. “When we run late, we hear about it,” says CEO Mario Ochoa.

Other game examples:

A Word Jumble of a local landmark.

Post a picture for people to guess where it was taken.

Guess how many almonds are in the cup.

Ask a weekly question then randomly choose a fan to reward with a prize.

4. Ask fans to share their best tips

Hiatus Spa is running a “Be Green and Be Good; Earth Month 2011” Contest. They asked fans to share tips on how to use less resources through this Web page. The tip with the most unique comments and "likes" wins three Hiatus Spa services. “The great thing is that this has really been fun—and people are sharing wonderful, useful information,” said Jordan Harbinger who helped run the contest.


5. Collect your fan’s favorite quotes

This is simple and can be applied to just about any business. Laura Ann Allahverdi is a Personal Life Coach who asked her fans to submit their favorite quotes. The person who got the most likes on their quote got a free session with Laura. She loved how people filled her Wall with inspirational posts—and fans got their friends involved in the contest, increasing her exposure to new networks.


6. Name the local celebrity game

Maia Yogurt said one of their most successful contests was a "local celebrity ID" game. They posted a picture of a local "celebrity"—they chose a popular and well-known independent grocery store owner so it helped garner some good will with the people they hoped to contact—and asked their Facebook fans to guess the person’s name to win a free MAIA T-shirt.


7. Reward “likes”

Again, you must be careful how you do this to fall within Facebook guidelines, but there are many ways to reward people for becoming fans.

Snack and Munch ships boxes of snacks to hungry office workers and college students so they’re ready for the munchies. To enter their contest, they ask people to “like” their page. They choose a weekly winner who gets a free box of 24 snacks. In the process, they get great feedback about their product.

The company has some solid advice about expectations: “You have to be patient because the success doesn’t come overnight, it takes time and persistent. Persistence is key, you have to keep on moving forward and not stop.”

Please share your Facebook contest success stories in the comments. ( openforum.com )

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Will the Web have a place in a world full of apps? - Last summer, in a much-read cover story, Wired proclaimed that the Web is dead. Chris Anderson, the magazine's editor, argued that loading pages in a browser is passé. The future, Anderson wrote, is in downloadable apps, which have several advantages over the Web. They're fast, they can be customized for specific purposes, and—perhaps most importantly—people seem to have no problem paying for them, which means that software and media companies have an incentive to keep creating more. Few of us, meanwhile, pay for Web content—and our reluctance, Anderson argued, spoke volumes about what we really want from our computers: "Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly."

Anderson's argument was instantly showered with criticism—much of it from people who write on the Web—but if you went beyond the blustery headline and graphics, it wasn't an unreasonable prediction. People spend a lot of time and money on apps these days, and many developers are indeed devoting more of their resources to apps than to the Web. Still, I've been skeptical of the Web-is-dead idea. The Web has one main advantage over apps: It works everywhere, and that's important in a post-Windows world. Since our computers, phones, and tablets use different operating systems, we need a single platform to unite them all. Sure, programmers can theoretically write different apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Palm, and every other gadget that comes along, but that doesn't seem tenable. Instead, they'll come to see the advantages of creating content and applications that work across devices. There's no better uniter than the Web.

But as I began to think about how the Internet will evolve—for this, the second article in my series on the future of tech—I found myself splitting the difference. Both Anderson's view—"The Web is dead!"—and my view—"Ditch the App Store!"—lack nuance. It seems safer and wiser to bet that the Web and apps will survive over the long run or, at least, for the next five years. Indeed, as mobile browsers and Web programming systems improve, the difference between sites you access from a browser and apps you download from a centralized store will surely shrink. Web sites will grow more adept at storing content locally (so you won't have to be online to use them), they'll get better at using your device's specialized hardware, and their interfaces will look and feel just as complex and responsive as those of native apps.

In other words, the fight between apps and the Web will be rendered moot. The two modes of getting online will become indistinguishable—you'll reach for the Web or apps or both, depending on the device you're using. The more relevant issue is that we'll all be getting online more, and for all kinds of tasks—listening to music, watching movies, reading books, playing games, doing office work, and communicating with friends and colleagues. Sun Microsystems' old slogan, "the network is the computer," gets truer every day. (It's telling that the slogan outlived the company.)

I don't think many people have internalized this future. When we buy computers and phones, we still check out how fast they are, how much RAM they've got, and how much storage space they carry. Apple will sell you a 16GB iPad 2 for just $500, but some people are willing to pay $200 more to get 64GB. Why? Because we haven't quite reached the stage when the specs of our gadgets cease to matter. In a few years, you won't care about local storage space nearly as much: As long as your machine can get access to fast broadband and can handle high-definition video, you'll be able to do pretty much anything with it. The device won't matter. The network will.

Let me be more specific: These days many people store e-mail, photos, and documents in the "cloud." It's possible that you get a lot of your entertainment via broadband lines, too (if you listen to Pandora, say, or spend your evenings with Netflix's streaming service). I predict that this trend will continue, but that we'll also see something more interesting. Instead of just using the network just to store data, we'll also rely on faraway servers for their processing power, too. For a taste of this, try OnLive, an Internet-gaming service that I've praised a couple times. OnLive lets you run high-def games—the kind that once required a monster PC or console—on rinky-dink hardware. OnLive does this by processing all of the video on very fast computers, then shuttling the images back to your machine over the Internet. This doesn't sound as if it should work, but it does, and very well, too. Now imagine the same process happening for other apps: You'd could edit video, crunch data sets, create music, or do other computationally complex tasks on your tablet or netbook—all the processing would take place far away, so seamlessly that you wouldn't notice anything amiss. This sounds fantastical. It's not. It's closer than you think.

Your devices' deeper integration with the Internet will change your life even if you don't do a lot of processor-intensive tasks. One of my favorite ideas about the future of computing is the notion of the "continuous client"—Joshua Topolsky's view that when we move from gadget to gadget, the stuff we're doing on one machine should travel with us. If you've got Slate and a spreadsheet open on your office computer when you leave for the day, the same windows should show up on your laptop at home, too. Right now, different companies are working on different aspects of this problem. Google's Chrome OS, which stores all data online, currently offers the most advanced implementation of the continuous client, but it's far from perfect. I suspect that continuity will be one of the main areas of interface innovation over the next few years. You'll use a plethora of gadgets made by different companies, but you'll pick up right where you left off as you flit from one to the next.

There is, of course, a huge question mark dangling over the network-enabled future I'm describing. This future depends on fast and ubiquitous broadband, which, in the oligopolistic American telecom market, isn't guaranteed to happen soon. Over the next few years, major American mobile carriers will adopt faster "4G" wireless Internet systems—but will they be fast, cheap, and reliable enough to spur the sort of innovation I'm describing? I don't know. Honestly, I'm pessimistic.

But even if the United States doesn't take part in this revolution, it's still going to happen. South Korea is working on a plan to increase its wired broadband speeds to 1 gigabit per second by the end of 2012, and it's aiming for wireless speeds of 10 megabits per second. These are roughly 10 times as fast as American broadband speeds. And it's not just South Korea; pretty much every other industrialized country has better broadband than we do. It's a scary thing to contemplate: If the network is the computer, and we don't have the network—what do we have?

What do you think—am I being too pessimistic about American broadband, or too optimistic about how the Internet will revolutionize our gadgets? Let me know your thoughts on the future of the Internet in the comments below. I'll discuss your ideas in a future column. ( slate.com )

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Bin Laden was 'within our grasp'

Bin Laden was 'within our grasp' – Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now.

More pointedly, it seeks to affix a measure of blame for the state of the war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Tommy Franks.

"Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the report says. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism."

The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora."

On or about Dec. 16, 2001, bin Laden and bodyguards "walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area," where he is still believed to be based, the report says.

Instead of a massive attack, fewer than 100 U.S. commandos, working with Afghan militias, tried to capitalize on air strikes and track down their prey.

"The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," the report said.

At the time, Rumsfeld expressed concern that a large U.S. troop presence might fuel a backlash and he and some others said the evidence was not conclusive about bin Laden's location. ( Associated Press )

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How to keep your web page private and safe

How to keep your web page private and safe. Accept friend requests safely. Only accept friend requests from people you know and report any messages or profiles that look suspicious.

Only confirmed friends can post to your wall or contact you via Facebook chat, so if you're worried that someone will make inappropriate posts or send offensive messages, you should ignore that person's request.

Use the 'blocking' function to stop abusive behaviour

A block prevents specific people from viewing a profile. When one is implemented, any ties that users have with the people you block will be broken, and these people won't be able to contact you through Facebook. If you receive abusive communication, we recommend that you block the offender by listing his or her name in the 'blocking people' box at the bottom of the privacy page.

Report abusive behaviour directly to Facebook

Reports are confidential and the user being reported does not know that they have been reported.

Facebook will investigate the issue and decide whether the content should remain on the site based on its terms of use.

A Facebook administrator looks into each report thoroughly to decide the appropriate course of action.

Control bullying by restricting privacy settings

To restrict the amount of information that potential bullies may have access to, users can also restrict the privacy settings on their Facebook accounts and can also customise their privacy settings to avoid being found in searches or having their profile viewed publicly.

Respond to abusers in the right way

Delete offensive posts from your wall or messages from your inbox and then use the 'blocking' or 'reporting' functions to resolve the issue safely. ( @ Independent News )

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Online nightmares

Online nightmares: How one teen went missing after agreeing to meet her online friend, Ashleigh Hall, 17, was found dead after going to see a man whom she allegedly met on the Net. Here, Mary Kozakiewicz recalls her own daughter's horrific ordeal.

"On New Year's Day in 2002 we had a family dinner. As I was clearing the table before I put the apple pies out for dessert, Alicia said she wasn't feeling well and asked to go upstairs. I said: "Sure, go ahead." Later, when she didn't respond to my call, I sent her brother up. He said: "She's not in her bedroom." She was gone just like that.

I had never been concerned about Alicia's internet use. She was 13, and although she was on the internet a couple of hours a day, all the kids in Pittsburgh were. I used to tell her: "Go outside, do something, go and play."

But she'd show me the monitor, and all her friends were there chatting with each other. We trusted that she was safe. Kids stopped reading books, they wrote things online, they did their homework online. They had profiling pages that they could fill out with their favourite things and a picture.

Alicia was a shy child, she didn't run on the streets, there was nobody's home she would have gone to at dinner time on New Year's Day. It was one of the coldest days of the year, icy, snowy and dark. We checked the yard, looked in the basement, finally we called the police. They said: "She'll be home by morning, she's probably with a friend," and they left.

It's surreal, you move into a different realm of consciousness because there's no answer. You're totally helpless. No warning. There was no sign of forced entry. She took nothing with her, no coat, no boots. She'd received money for Christmas. It was still on her dresser.

I was not computer-savvy at the time; I was a stay-at-home mum. My husband was a salesman in an office where people were starting to use email and there were urban legends of internet predators, and it was him who made the link. He told the police, they took away the computer, went through its history but they saw nothing. On the second day we were told that recovering her would probably be a million to one shot because there were no clues. We got her quickly into the media through the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, and posters went up.

But my husband was right. In the apparent safety of her bedroom my daughter had met a man online, a 38-year-old computer programmer from Herndon, Virginia, whom she had been introduced to in a chat room. He had persuaded her to meet him. We learnt later that he was divorced. His daughter had just spent Christmas with him; she was my daughter's age.

He dropped his own daughter off at the airport and then drove into Pittsburgh to pick up mine. His intention was to make her his sex slave. My daughter believes she had a very short shelf life. He held her captive in a dungeon he had created in his basement, he raped her, he abused her, he beat her, he tortured her, he kept her chained with a locking dog collar around her neck.

We found her only because he showed a video of himself with her to a crony of his, another weirdo. This man called the FBI, fearing that the predator was going to kill my daughter, and that he would be an accomplice because he had seen the abuse.

The FBI broke into the house, I think it was on January 5. It was all one long day to me, I never slept, I never ate. We had a phone call from the FBI saying we needed to come down immediately. It had been four days, and three quarters of all stranger-abducted children are dead within three hours. I thought I was going to identify my daughter.

They ushered us into a room and the agents told us they had managed to save her. That was the best moment of my life. The next morning they flew us to Virginia and we got her back. But we will always ask: Could we have done more? And how could we have known?

When kids socialise online there is no such thing as a stranger, and we parents were simply not aware of that. Kids have their real-life flesh and blood friends at school. These friends introduce them to a friend who goes to a school in the next town but they're not a stranger because they have a friend in common. Friends have friends who have friends and maybe a month or two later, or perhaps just days, they're speaking to the most unsavoury of characters.

Kids don't think. They assume everything is okay because they know the name of this guy's puppy, his sister, his mother, all of which can be false.

To this day, I have no idea what this predator told my daughter. When you're horribly traumatised your brain refuses to remember some things.

Alicia, too, has huge gaps in her memory. I know she and the predator talked about everything but I don't know the details, partly because Alicia doesn't remember a lot, and partly because any sexual element is not something we talk about. It's too painful. But I know that he gradually became her best friend, he supported her emotionally, listened to her problems.

Thirteen is a difficult age, her friends were starting to do crazy things and she felt that she wasn't fitting in any more. I realise now that those feelings can be manufactured by the predator. He pulls you apart.

Just as a husband abuses his wife, a predator online will pull a child away from her family and friends, to make her dependent on him. If the child has a bad grade at school, he'll say: "That's fine, your teacher's stupid." If your friends say something not nice, it's: "Do I ever say things like that?" This man appeared to offer my daughter unconditional love.

When we got Alicia back it was very painful. The child that is returned to you after something like this is not the child that left. But we were lucky, she was alive. The law enforcement officers did not denigrate Alicia. They told her she was a hero for having survived, that she kept her head, did what she had to do to keep herself alive. The predator got 20 years. His name was Scott Tyree but we don't use it because it gives him credence.

Did I miss any signs of internet "grooming"? I don't call it grooming, I call it internet seduction. It's starry little princesses dreaming of Prince Charming and getting the bogeyman instead.

The problem for parents is that most teenage children are argumentative, spend a lot of time in their room, enjoy spending hours on the internet late at night. So how do you work out what is simply the behaviour of a normal adolescent?

When we found Alicia on the computer late at night she would say: "I forgot to do my history paper," and sure enough there would be a history paper. What parent is going to say: "Don't be conscientious, don't stay up and finish that paper"? Of course you say: "Honey finish it up quick and get to bed."

What parents have to realise is that the internet is the focus of our children's lives. What they're doing online is the same thing that everyone is doing: they're seeking love, attention, they're bored. Anything that they can't do in real life, they can do online, and engaging in a virtual world is now part of their growing up. If you're 12 and have braces you can go online and be 23 and a femme fatale. It's a game, it's fun, whatever's offered to them they grab without thinking.

Some parents find it hard to understand their children's growing awareness of their sexuality but our kids are sexually aware and they talk about sex on the internet. All we can do is make our children aware that the dangers out there are very real.

Alicia is 21 now and still has flashbacks, nights when it's hard to sleep. She studying psychology and forensics at university and wants to join the FBI and eventually work with traumatised children.

But life is harder for her than it would have been. We try to make sure that what happened to her doesn't happen to others. We go into schools and speak with kids about it. Alicia doesn't say: "Don't go on Myspace or Facebook," because kids are going to do that.

But she does try to teach them to be aware of differentiating between who is a stranger and who isn't. And to make the danger real to them, she shows them her missing posters and the newspaper stories from when she was found -- with headlines such as "Girl found safe but tied up".

Alicia describes the internet as possibly the greatest social experiment of all time but one in which children can be the sacrificial guinea pigs. I use the analogy of a loaded gun. No one warned us about it yet they blamed us when the kids started to shoot themselves.

Mary and Alicia Kozakiewicz run The Alicia Project helping to give support, information and education about internet predators.( @ Independent News )

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How social sites are a hunting ground for people with grudges

How social sites are a hunting ground for people with grudges. Be warned, writes Nikki Walsh, the school-yard bully has gone digital.

Julia*(19) is a business student from Dublin. She and her boyfriend Declan (20) became victims of cyberbullying when photographs of her and Declan were Fotoshopped and uploaded onto Facebook portraying him as a pig.

"It was all done in jest, in a jokey, jokey way, but it was not very nice," admits Julia. "It would have been different if we knew the people involved, but we didn't so it was odd and sinister." Eventually Julia found out that the bully was an admirer of hers, hoping to undermine her boyfriend.

"I see him all the time," she says, "but I have never spoken to him. In fact, I stay well away from him now."

Julia's experience is not unusual. According to a study by the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College, Dublin, one in seven teenagers are victims of cyber-bullying, with most of it occurring on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo.

It takes many forms -- repeatedly posting insults on people's 'walls'; starting online fights via email or instant messaging; posting embarrassing or humiliating photographs; tricking people into revealing secrets or sharing them online; impersonating people and posting material to damage their reputation; and even creating new sites under a person's name.

When Karen* (28) logged onto Facebook she found a new page under her name, using her original profile photograph. "Someone had created a new page for me, listing a whole new set of activities and interests in my profile, including 'sleeping around'. There were also postings on my wall calling me a slut. I was shocked."

Karen made a complaint and the site was closed down, but she did not know who created it until months later when she split up with her boyfriend and discovered it was the work of his ex-girlfriend. She has left Facebook now.

"It is not worth it," she said. "You have no idea who could be raking through your photographs. It's the perfect hunting ground for people with grudges or jealous exes."

While cyberbullying doesn't happen in person, it can, for that reason, be far more brutal than normal bullying. "People say things online that they would never actually say to each other's faces," says Julia.

"In schools, all fights are conducted through Facebook," she explains.

Frances Sweetman teaches civics in Dublin. "Most of the children I teach believe that if you put your photograph and your personal information on Facebook, you are asking for a bit of flak," she says.

According to A Parent's Guide to Social Networking Sites, some 28pc of teens say they do not know what to do if they are harassed or bullied online. Most do nothing. Julia and her boyfriend did not approach their bully, nor did Karen.

So, what should they be doing? Online experts advise everyone to avoid contact with the bully; block their access to the site; change their online information where necessary; file a report or lodge a complaint with the site and, if need be, to delete their account.

Sinead* (32) left Facebook last year after an ex began posting notes on her wall. "I am glad I didn't feed it," she says. "It was much more effective to just leave and not get embroiled in anything nasty or emotionally draining. As soon as I left, that was the end of it. I never heard from him again."

There are also measures anyone can take to avoid being bullied, as detailed by Facebook on their site (see below).

Facebook is self-regulating, so users can -- and do -- report content that is questionable or offensive. Any groups that violate its terms of use are removed, while fake profiles are regularly disabled when they're reported. Facebook is keen to stress that social networking, if used safely and correctly, can be fun. Psychologists agree, believing that networking sites develop teenagers' social skills, bridging class and racial divides and providing them with a forum for issues they feel they can't talk about face to face.

So how can parents protect their teens from cyberbulling? Communication is key -- WiredSafety.org research shows that teenagers who discuss social networking websites with their parents behave more cautiously online, so parents should open up a discussion on cyberbullying, educating their teens about how cyberbullies can use their personal information against them and discussing what information is appropriate for them to share online.

Boundaries should also be set. Teens should be wary of anyone who they do not know who wants to join their networks and they should be told not to meet anyone they've met online.

Left unchecked, the effects of cyberbullying can be devastating -- just last month, English-born school girl Holly Grogan jumped to her death after years of being cyberbullied. In a statement her family said: "Holly struggled to cope with the huge pressures placed upon her by the modern complexities of 'friendship groups' and social networking." ( @Independent News )

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