I was surprised to find Google Buzz integrated to my Gmail account last night, OK, I think it was early this morning Malaysian time, but I didn’t bother checking it out until just now.

As mentioned, the whole Buzz feature has been integrated in the Gmail account, opening in a page accessible by clicking on the Buzz link just below the link to our inbox. On the surface, it looks like a pretty neat feature that allows us to update our status messages much like what we are doing on Twitter and Facebook. Yes, Google is late to the game.

Anyway, while this is neat, I don’t think I like this being IN my email account. You see, I sometimes like showing photos of my friends on Facebook to my parents or other family members and I just don’t feel comfortable having my email exposed to them and don’t like the thought of them going through my email just because I want to show them a photo or two.

And you know, with multiple Gmail accounts for different purposes, it is going to be pretty tough following people with all the logging in and out!

In line with Yahoo!’s new policy to let go of web businesses that are outside of their core focus i.e. news, entertainment and communications, the company will be selling their online job board, HotJobs, to Monster. Yahoo! acquired HotJobs for $439 million approximately eight years ago but is selling it to Monster Worldwide Inc. for $225 million only.

The world has been struggling with a recession since 2008 that saw many people losing their jobs. I would think that this is a good time to revive an online job board like HotJobs. It is an old brand and would not have difficulty in gaining trust from online job seekers but at the same time, large corporations have found an easier and cheaper way to fill positions in their workforce by utilizing social networks.

It’s quite sad, you know, seeing how Yahoo! is losing chucks on investment from their sell-off or closure of other web entities but I guess they know their business better than anyone else. I personally hope that I do not have to use any of these online job boards to look for a job any time soon!

If you are a web savvy person, you probably have a Twitter account. However, if you are like one of the millions of ordinary people you probably do not have a huge following. Well, I myself have less than ten people following me, half of whom I don’t even know! But I don’t mind because I don’t use Twitter all that much. I only use it to fee my Facebook status.

Anyway, there are people who are trying to make money from Twitter and how much one could command very much depend on the size of followers. If you are looking to expand your Twitter followers, perhaps you should check out eBay.

Yes, don’t be surprised that you can now buy thousands of Twitter followers on eBay cheaply. Granted, these are just shell accounts which not much activities and when you spew sponsored tweets, no one would really take notice. After all, these are fake accounts but they serve the purpose of making up the numbers. Are you desperate enough? LOL

Google has kicked off their “social search” feature that supposedly will gather information from our social network profiles like Facebook. Some of the information pulled may include our name, photos, our friends, the pages or groups or applications that we are a fan of, etc.

Of course, although Google may now have this ability, it is up to us to make the necessary changes of how much information we want to be listed on Google by adjusting our privacy level at the account control panel or settings of the social network profile.

There are pros and cons whether we want to be on Google or not. I think the main thing that we have to take into consideration when we decide to allow or disallow Google to list our social network profile, is what we use the profile for.

In any case, it is good to occasionally check that your privacy settings are as your have saved them. You know, sometimes updates would switch your settings to default. That could be pretty unnerving. LOL