The Soapbox Archives:
I like the group atmosphere where everyone sits down in the same place and time to have a meal so there's always a good chance I'll meet someone new with whom to dance at every meal. The place doesn't empty out three times a day while people go foraging for food. I haven't had this kind of experience in a hotel environment since Boogie In The Mountain back in the 90s.
As usual, the emphasis is on learning and dancing; there are only a few dance competitions for those who like that sort of stuff. I was never much for watching someone *else* dance. (which is why I don't watch shows like Dancing with the Stars; living vicariously through other people isn't all that much fun).
In the spirit of trying to get you to follow the lead of your Facebook "friends", they let you know that someone on your list used a particular service. In this case, it was singles meeting website and it told me that someone (I actually knew) used this service. Now, I really have no idea of this person actually used this service or if he merely clicked on the link by accident. I myself click on a lot of those side links in the course of playing some Facebook games (the only real reason I use Facebook) so I don't play much attention to those pop-up webpages except to close them before they even have a chance to complete their display.
However, like they say, there's no expectation of privacy on the social networking and people need to understand what this really means. Imagine having your friends call your significant other because they saw that your name displayed with an advertisement for a singles dating service.
I've been seeing a lot of spam and attempts to get people to click on malware links from the accounts of people using free web-based email like AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail. Hackers and/or spammers manage to break into these accounts and send out mass-mailings to everyone on the victim's address book which I should mention is stored on the email service's servers.
Why are users of these services getting hacked more often? If you're using a web-based email program, your address book will reside on the server and that's a treasure-trove of legitimate email addresses to target. With so many users on that service, a dictionary attack is more likely to be successful. Private domains won't have as many users on them and aren't as worthwhile for hacking. Those who keep their address books in Outlook, Thunderbird, and other local email programs are less likely to bother their friends with targetted spam if someone breaks into their email account.
If you use the services of these free email providers, at least do yourself a big favor and make sure your password is hard to figure out. For example, if you're a dancer, "lindyhop" is a bad (and stupid) password. Include numbers and non-alphanumeric characters and mix in uppercase letters. Don't make it easy for peopl to break into your email accounts and don't assume that your password is too smart to figure out (think *long* passwords).