Using social media and the Internet to reunite homeless people with their family and other loved ones? Brilliant! That’s what Miracle Messages is doing, and their stated goal is to reunite 1% of the world’s homeless population with loved ones.

A new proposal by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division would revise their current information collection system for foreigners applying to enter the United States by requesting information about the individual’s Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. CBP is proposing that “Please enter information associated with your online presence – Provider/Platform – Social media identifier” be added to the applications for entry to the U.S..

We’ve been telling readers for years that you need to be very careful about what you say and post on social media, whether Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, or other sites. It can be used against you in divorce proceedings, in lawsuits and criminal trials, and, of course, in the court of popular opinion. Now add another place it can be used against you to the list: during the background check for your Federal security clearance. (Full text of directive below.)

In case you haven’t heard, social media prenups are a thing now. (What is a social media prenup? It’s a prenuptial agreement spelling out what you can – and more importantly what you can’t – post about the other person on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc..)

If you or your kids are a product of the last three decades, you may have FOMO, and not even realize that it’s a thing. FOMO stands for “Fear of Missing Out”, and today’s teens and 20- and 30-somethings, unlike any other generations before them, have maximum FOMO.

If you are on Match.com, you may have seen the new Match.com verification system. This is an option that let’s you verify who you are by connecting to your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, even LinkedIn. Let us repeat that: on a dating site, Match, you connect to your social media accounts so people know who you are.

In the past few years the term “dark social” has come into play, but just what is dark social – what does it mean, and why does it matter (if it does matter)? Here’s the low-down on dark social.

We all know the importance, in business, to have a social media team. However, that the Syrian rebels have a social media team in Turkey, set up to meet United States CIA arming requirements may come as a surprise to some.

Social media command centers, staffed with social media first responders known as “social care representatives” are being implemented by companies who grasp what many brands fail to recognize: that social media is a real-time customer service voice that brands can be used for social media successes, or ignored and turned into public social media disasters. Airlines, in particular, are jumping on board.

The social media campaign to help find the nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, hashtag BringBackOurGirls ( #BringBackOurGirls ) is now under a cloud because the pictures that the campaign is using are not only not of the kidnapped girls, but they aren’t even of Nigerian girls.

The Boston Marathon bombing, like most tragedies, has prompted countless reflections and questions; some of this soul-searching has been quite general – how is humanity capable of both ruinous evil and heroic good? – and some of it is quite specific – how many people where injured, who are they, exactly how did they get hurt? The much-discussed topic of how technology and social media have impacted the response to the Boston Marathon killings is both general and specific. It is general in that people are asking expansive questions about what role, if any, amateurs armed with computers and an internet connection should play in an active terrorist investigation, and it is specific in that, regardless of how you answer the first question, amateurs are playing a role in an active terrorist investigation, zeroing in on the minutest details of the thousands of photos of the crime scene floating around the internet. We’ll attempt to navigate between the two poles, exploring the intersection of technology, social media, and the Boston Marathon bombing details that have emerged so far.

Justin Timberlake is again bringing sexy back, this time to Myspace. Unveiling the new Myspace on Monday, Justin Timberlake and his two fellow investors, Chris and Tim Vanderhook, premiered a video presentation to company employees. The new design is sleek, graphically pleasing, is easy to use, imports Facebook contacts, and brings together users and their favorite artists. As Tim Vanderhook put it, “In a single sentence, it’s a social network for the creative community to connect to their fans.”

Twitter made a surprising announcement that has the social media world buzzing. They announced that they would be censoring Tweets in certain countries, when requested to do so by officials in the specific country.

Arab spring, flash mobs, and last week’s riots in England. What two things do these have in common? Well, first, they have a people ready to be incited to action – be it for the cause of democracy, for a flash mob, or for chaos, mayhem, and lining their own pockets with ill-gotten goods. And second, social media has contributed to the lightning speed with which each of the groups coordinated and coalesced.

The next time someone asks you about social networking, and what it is, or to describe a social networking website, you need look no further than the laws of the state of Illinois. Because Illinois has taken the unusal step of defining just what makes a social networking site, in the context of their new law banning sex offenders from using any social networking site.