Last year, Virgin Atlantic found employees slagging off customers on Facebook. Last week it was Tesco’s turn. Now, Waitrose has found their staff making nasty noises in the online world.

The insults aren’t particularly great – with comments calling customers pikeys, ugly, mad and smelly – which could be extremely damaging to the brand and its connotations.

Waitrose response was that it is “completely unacceptable behaviour. It goes against our codes of conduct which make it very clear that partners who post this type of material are in breach of their terms of employment….The nature of the internet makes it difficult to get content removed once posted, however we do have teams that monitor website activity and will be conducting an immediate investigation.”

Personally, I think responding favorably offline in this way is a great way of ensuring something online can be brought under control. Social media is notoriously difficult to reign in if negative views are floating around – and by reassuring customers that they’re taking the matter seriously, as well as giving off signs to staff that it won’t be tolerated, Waitrose seem to be dealing with this quite well.

Love Twitter AND Google?

Well, now your Christmas has come early, as the micro-blogging site is about to be integrated with Google Friend Connect.

Basically, this means that when you join a friend-connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile and discover who you might know has also joined. You can also Tweet to the world about what’s going on.

Friend Connect lets webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks. Announced in May, it was launched this month, but isn’t a particularly new idea, as Facebook and MySpace have been running this for a while. (Facebook Connect and MySpaceID).

Interestingly, MySpaceID went live in the early half of the same month that Google annouced it’s Friend Connect concept. And Twitter was a partner with MSID. Even more confusing, Google partnered with MySpace to challenge Facebook.

Confused yet? This is like some social version of the whole Google-Yahoo-Microsoft saga earlier this year…

Facebook’s 120m users are being attacked by a virus…

Designed to steal credit card information and ID’s, ‘Koobface’ spreads by sending a message to people’s inboxes, pretending to be from a friend.

If you get a message saying something along the lines of “you look funny in this new video” or “you look just awesome in this new video”, don’t open it…

We all knew it would only be a matter of time before hackers began using social networking sites to try to cash in – although we saw this very same virus on MySpace back in August.

Facebook won’t give any specifics on how many users have been hit by the virus, only saying it’s a small percentage, but with that many users, it’s likely to be a considerable amount of people who have been unfortunate enough to be hit.

Ok, so a bit of an old video. But still adds to that Friday feeling!

More serious blogs will follow, I promise.

In case anyone missed it, the US intelligence agencies – CIA, FBI, IBM – announced that Twitter means terror.

A rough report that somehow (as usual) found its way onto the internet gives a fun list of online and mobile apps – including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter – that apparently terrorists could be using. (As an aside, if I worked for a security agency, I’d be more worried about how a report like that got out onto the internet).

I won’t deny that social media has been – and still is – used by people to post extremist ideology, racism and the like, but when this happened, it’s totally unacceptable and is more often than not removed very quickly, with often nasty reprocussions for whoever posted it.

I think though, what they’re panicking about is that certain media is practically in realtime, therefore seemingly a great tool for the tech-savvy terrorist. Which, to be honest, is possibly pushing any boundary of common sense; I personally doubt such people would be operating openly on social platforms - and what about all the other technological advances since the carrier pidgeon? Email, SMS - even a phone call - seem more likely to be used by the social-conscious terrorist.

I suppose, for arguments sake, that social platforms could be used for grooming and recruiting into that kind of thing, but I’m fairly sure we’d all notice if al-Qaeda was on Bebo.

Now our wonderful Government seems to be calling for the likes of GCHQ and Mi5 to be able to monitor mobile and internet-based systems, storing details of ALL phone calls made and websites visited for up to two years in some kind of storage-super-computer. The wonderful Jacqui Smith seems to suggested this, but even top anti-terror experts are saying it’s nuts.

At least makes Google’s ideas on data storage look like a nice option, for once.

Just a quick post today:

Following on from my offhand comments yesterday about the rapidly developing merge between online and offline media (mainly television), the internet and the technology it brings is undoubtly a brilliant means to unite global news. Fine; we all know that, but it seems to me that with the ever-growing presence of the web in people’s lives, the internet iteself is increasingly becoming a subject of news.

Just by Googling the term “internet news” yields 111m search results, and “news ABOUT the internet” gives me 170m. Ok, a lot of this will be indexed back to past issues – some results might not even be that relevant – but all the major players around the globe have either microsites or pages dedicated solely to developments within the online industry, and they seem to be getting bigger and better each day. Whilst obvious players include wide-ranges from BBC technology and the Guardian, through to CNN and the New York Times, it seems the internet (rather ironically) is promoting itself online through other portal news sources, such as the current Yahoo homepage (TWO features this morning: Mi6 recruiting through Facebook and the creation of a new internet watchdog) and MSN, through to the likes of specialist sites like NewsNow and Blinkx. Even blogs can provide reasonably up-to-date news.

The internet is using itself to shamelessly self-promote, and I love it even more for that very reason.