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Last week, Dan Leuck invited me to join TechHui, a website that he developed. According to Dan, “TechHui is a new social network for Hawaii’s tech community. It provides groups and forums covering subjects ranging from software development and social networks to biofuel and entrepreneurship.”

TechHui has more than 200 members, and the site features discussion forums on project management, blogging, and computer software. Dan has a special interest in Java software development, so there are forums for those topics, too.

The site also lets users post videos, images web links and other objects. The interface supports several customization options for privacy, themes, and other features that have become key success factors on social networking sites.

These are scripts I have written for Greasemonkey, a Firefox plugin that is available on this page.

Internet Duct Tape has an excellent explanation of what Greasemonkey is and how to install this handy extension.

If you already have Greasemonkey installed, click any of the links below to install that script.

• Hide LinkedIn News Box (25 February 2008)

I’ve been removing apps from my Facebook account over the last month. Some of these apps sounded fun when these apps were a novelty. Over time, I got more and more invitations from other Facebook members to add more apps.

But SuperWall and FunWall were slower than the default Facebook Wall. I didn’t really want to draw graffiti on my Wall.

The Oktoberfest app was fun in September, when it first appeared. After it morphed into beer, it became dull.

Finally, I decided I had enough. MyAquarium infected our Windows computer with malware that took 3 hours of systematic registry hacking and file deletions to remove.

After I did my little victory dance, I deleted MyAquarium from my account and reported the app to Facebook.

The New York Times ran an article today about online impression management. Academic researchers have examined how users post meaningful photos of themselves, and send carefully worded email messages. As I mentioned last June, employers have used MySpace and Facebook to investigate job applicants. Users who claim this form of background checking is an invasion of their personal privacy should consider why their made their profiles publicly available during their job search.

Because my Facebook site is linked to my university e-mail address, my Facebook site makeover continues. My page is still fun and festive, but it’s a bit more guarded these days.

In a Business Week article earlier this week, Aaron Ricadela examined Facebook’s growing popularity with adults.

Social networking is a business tool

Facebook was started at Harvard, and remains popular with university students. I’ve had a Facebook account for almost 2 years, and I’ve recently seen more of my colleagues join that site.

As I’ve pointed out here on June 30 and on my old blog on September 11, some employers have used Facebook, MySpace and other social networking services to investigate applicants. MySpace is an annoying clutter of images, spam and media files, and I rarely check my MySpace account these days. Facebook is quieter, and it seems safer, although that site has become a popular target for malware distribution, according to yesterday’s brief article in Campus Technology.

Entrepreneurs and executives have found that Facebook is a great way to do their own social networking. I think that Facebook is more fun to use than LinkedIn, a popular social networking site that is geared towards working professionals. My colleagues seem to prefer LinkedIn to Facebook.

LinkedIn is hanging on to its audience – for now. Facebook’s mobile site is much easier to use than LinkedIn’s current offering, and that may be one reason that Facebook is gaining older users. My July 2nd article discussed how executives are being targeted through search engines and social networking sites such as LinkedIn.

ZDNet reports that several hundred CXOs are receiving a new kind of email attack. Messages containin Word documents that include an executable file. If the recipient clicks on the file, it runs a zero-day exploit on the victim’s computer.

According to MessageLabs, the recipients tend to be CXOs as follows:

• 30% chief investment officers
• 11% chief executive officers
• 6% chief financial officers

The targets are technically inexperienced victims whose computers may hold interesting personal or corporate data. Attackers find the victims names through search engines and social networking sites. I’m guessing that LinkedIn is one of these sites.