And Now You Can Use Facebook To Share Your Citibank Rewards Points With Your Friends

NEW YORK (AP) — Credit card rewards are the new social currency.
Citibank customers can now use Facebook to pool their rewards points online.
The bank on Tuesday launched a Facebook application that lets users team up to use their points, whether it's for charity, a group gift or a personal goal. Citi says it's the first bank to offer such a feature.
The app builds on a service Citi introduced last year that lets customers transfer points to one another on the bank's homepage. After getting feedback, executives decided to expand the rewards sharing capability and offer it through social media.
"Now we're delivering it to where customers are every day," said Ralph Andretta, who heads Citi's loyalty programs and co-branded cards.
Andretta noted that customers will have far more flexibility with their points, whether it's to help a friend fly home from college or team up for a big-ticket reward. The company is giving away 2,500 free rewards points to each of the first 4,000 customers to sign up.
To get started, customers download the ThankYou Point Sharing App, which is linked on Citi's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/citibank.
Customers can then start a rewards pool by naming a recipient and explaining its purpose. The recipient of the points maintains control of any contributions, so it's best if you know and trust that person.
Pool recipients must be individuals and cannot be an organization, even if the intended goal is a charitable donation.
Users can promote their goals by sharing links on their Facebook pages or privately inviting other Citi customers to contribute. Donors can see the total number of points a cause has amassed.
The app can collect personal information from Facebook profiles. But Citi says it does not share any customer account information with Facebook.
The program isn't only for credit card holders either. Citi checking account customers can also earn ThankYou points. Citi introduced its lineup of ThankYou credit cards last year.

Facebook Is Cited As Evidence In One Third Of UK Divorce Filings

Facebook is cited as evidence for 33% of all UK divorces in 2011, reports ZDnet.That number is up from 20% in 2009.
These numbers come from Divorce Online, which randomly sampled 5,000 divorce filings each year.
Troubled couples repeatedly brought up three Facebook-related complaints as cause to divorce, usually after the couple was in a trial separation -- seeing inappropriate messages to the opposite sex, publicly writing nasty comments about a spouse, or Facebook friends continually reporting a spouse's behavior as "offensive."
By comparison, Twitter was cited in 0.4% of divorces.
What does it mean to you that Facebook increasingly appears in divorce filings?
UPDATE: A commenter says that Divorce Online's study is inaccurate and points us to a different report indicating that Facebook is actually mentioned in just 5% of UK divorce filings.

This Site Was Supposed To Store Your Memories, But Now It's Going Under

Before most even knew about InterActiveCorp's social network Proust.com, the memory site announced that it will shut down at the end of January and urged current users to export their memories.
I got a preview of the product back in July. It looked good, but the idea of having to answer random questions about my life never really resonated, and it was too disconnected with my social networks.
It's not surprising that Proust is shutting its doors, now that the private social network app Path and Facebook Timeline are all about preserving memories. So now, whatever memories users shared on this social network are encouraged to save those memories before they disappear. Ironic?
Liz Gannes at All Things D posted IAC's statement, regarding the closure of the site:
Since its launch in 2010, Proust slowly gained users but did not result in an associated revenue substantial enough to maintain operations. We explored several strategic options for Proust, but decided that the best option was to fold its assets into IAC.
The site was part of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also funds Vimeo, The Daily Beast, and Match.com. The site was founded by Tom Cortese and Jason Fotinatos in 2010.

Mark Zuckerberg To Spend Eight Crazy Nights Down In Uruguay

At work, Mark Zuckerberg is the one trying, and often failing, to meet the demands of his 800 million users. But on vacation in Uruguay for eight days, the Facebook CEO gets to be the one issuing requests. And he's a rather insane customer.
The local press is full of stories about the visit by Zuckerberg, his girlfriend, and seven other friends to Punta del Esta, a resort town on the South American country's southeastern coast. The changes demanded by the 27-year-old billionaire to the house he's been lent, apparently by a fellow businessman, give a sense of how obsessive-compulsive he can be. Keep in mind these arrangements are for a jaunt of barely one week:
The pets were banished. "Pets that live on the property were taken to a vet because, within the millionaire's group, some people are very allergic," reports El Pais.
Everything was scrubbed with special chemicals. "All the property was cleaned with special products," El Pais added.
A ridiculous number of servants and guards were hired. It sounds like roughly a 1-1 ratio of staff to visitors: A chef, a cook, two maids, two bodyguards, and at least two "specially hired security guards." So at least eight people serving nine guests.
All the furniture was replaced. If you're going to be hanging out somewhere for eight whole days, do you really want out-of-date, unfashionable, dusty old millionaire-vacation-home furniture lying around? No you do not, not if you're worth $17.5 billion. All furniture in the vacation home was reportedly removed and replaced.
Maybe Zuckerberg is planning some kind of big party. He's hardly the only internet mogul hanging out in South America this southern summer. At the airport in Rio the other day, a greeter held up a sign for Spotify founder (and recent Facebook partner) Daniel Ek, according to our man in Brazil. And - this just in from our Uruguay tipster - Sean Parker has arrived at the Laguna del Sauce airport.
This post originally appeared on Gawker.com

What's With Rick Santorum's Sweater Vests?

When he's not the subject of traumatizing Google searches or the latest darling of America's social conservatives , Rick Santorum wears another hat: fashionista.
Santorum's personal uniform of late, a sweater vest over a collared shirt, has sparked increasing social media attention, including a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a YouTube music video called "Sleeves Slow Me Down." And with phrases including "Ninjas only wish they had such covert superpowers" and "Meet your demise terrorism" attributed to the garments, "the vest" has even begun to acquire its own cult of personality akin to that surrounding Chuck Norris' tongue-in-cheek machismo.
On Fox News Tuesday, he told Laura Ingraham that he began wearing the vests consistently after a speaking event in mid-December. "If there was one event that really began the moment, it was that speech," he said. "So all the sudden the sweater vest was like, 'Fear the vest.'"
So what's in a vest?
In an interview with Business Insider, Hendrick Pohl, men's fashion expert and CEO of ties-necktie.com, said that the uniform helps to create Santorum's personal brand. And while the online hype increases the candidate's visibility and youth appeal, the impact of this casual look on Santorum's image, he says, might not be all positive.
Of course, Santorum is not the only politician who regularly dresses down. Mitt Romney often wears a sweater over a collared shirt in informal talks. But that combination, Pohl says, is "a little bit more conservative and a little bit more businesslike than having a sweater vest."
"I think as a politician you should always dress a bit more on the conservative side," he said. "You don't want to make fashion statements, you don't want to stand out too much."
While Ingraham said that the vest may win him some support — "People find it endearing. They kind of like it.” — in the long run, Pohl says the sweater vests could send the wrong message.
"It looks like he's having a drink at a golf club," says Pohl. "It just doesn't look like he's at work."
Pohl says to keep an eye on Santorum's fashion choices: he might abandon the vest in other states after Iowa to reflect voter tastes. No matter what he decides, Pohl says, his vest status won't be an accident.
"They don't just randomly pick something," he says. "They put some thought into it. They have somebody advising them about it."

Where Are You Picking Up All Those PC Viruses? Facebook

Facebook has become a cesspool of computer viruses.
One out of five links that show up in your news stream will send you to a site that will infect your machine, according to research from security vendor Zone Alarm.
Attackers have all sorts of reasons for wanting to infect your machine, none of them good. Sophisticated criminal networks are trying to gather as many PCs as they can to become zombies in their botnets. This means that they can get your computer to do things without your knowledge, like:
Help them gain illegal advertising revenue by running a click-jacking scheme
Getting the zombies to click on ads placed on their websites. Or they might have your PC help them send spam.
Have your PC help them compromise more Facebook accounts to post more zombie-gathering viruses.
They might put a scanner or keylogger on your PC, hoping to discover your passwords when you go to banking or shopping sites.
In the first half of 2011, Windows users downloaded over 10 million viruses onto their machines, Microsoft says, and those are only the ones that Microsoft security software could detect and remove. There's no telling how many more undetected viruses were successfully installed.
Of those detected viruses, Facebook is increasingly the source.

No, Facebook Won't Take Down Ugly Pictures Of You

For some reason, hordes of Facebook users think that by "reporting spam" on pictures they don't like of themselves, Facebook will need to take them down.
Facebook takes down very few of these pictures.
In fact, the majority of photos Facebook users tag as "offensive" are only offensive to those users, according to Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar on NPR.
Here's some news: Facebook only takes down pictures that depict nudity, hate speech, drug use, violence, and spam.
So don't waste your time.
The real issue here: your inability to confront your trigger-happy photographer friend.
Bejar added:
We made it such that when you hit report, we ask you if you're in the photo. And then we ask you if the photo is unflattering or if you don't like how you show up in it or whether you find it harassing or bullying you.
And most people say, you know, I don't like how I look in this photo. And in the first version we did of this, we put up a blank message box where you can send a message to the person who posted the photo, usually a friend of yours.
And most people faced with that blank box wouldn't put anything in there in which they would, sort of, step out of the fore because they didn't know how to handle that conversation with their friends.