Amid growing concern about online safety for minors, including the threats of bullying and various other kinds of harassment, on April 13 Facebook unveiled its new "Safety Center" -- an online resource center for parents consisting of guidelines, advice, a Q&A section, and links to organizations with more information about keeping teens safe online. If I had to summarize my reaction -- as a non-parent -- to the Safety Center in one word, it would be "exhausting." As in, dear God, having kids must be exhausting.

This week brought another study showing the steady increase in consumers using mobile devices to access social networks. This one comes from Ground Truth, a mobile media measurement firm, which found that social network activity accounts for 60% of the time spent on the mobile Internet. That's more than four times the amount devoted to the next most-popular activity -- Web portals -- which accounts for just 13.7% of total mobile Internet use. It's also way ahead of mobile messaging, which claimed just 7.4% of total time spent, and mobile downloads, which accounted for just 1.3%.

I'm not about to stick up for bullies: as a nerd in middle school and high school I received my fair share of abuse, and believe me I have no love for the S.O.B.s. Frankly, I hope they're dead (if that's shocking to you, then you probably weren't ever the victim of bullying). But the recent trend towards legislation to prevent "cyber-bullying" seems way off-base.

This may be the best example yet of the growing power of social media, including Twitter and blogs, to bring about sudden, sweeping political change. Over the weekend India's junior foreign minister, Shashi Tharoor, resigned his post amid revelations of widespread corruption in India's cricket leagues. Tweets by Lalit Modi, the mercurial boss of the Indian Premier League, led to Tharoor's downfall.

One of the amusing (or annoying) things about social networks is the phenomenon of the "fake friend" -- the person you really don't know whom you somehow end up being "friends" with anyway. There's any number of reasons why this happens, but it often seems to boil down to the fact that the aggressor treats social networking as a big game to collect the largest number of online friends, or he or she just has a different idea of what social networking is for (or a different idea of what constitutes a "friend," for that matter).

Speaking from a personal perspective as a secular coastal media type, it's easy to forget the huge role of religion in American life. But at some point in my lifetime I expect we'll all be reminded by another broad-based religious revival -- the latest in a series of revivals that have occurred periodically throughout American history. And it will take place through social media.

Like any company with a marketing organization worthy of the name, Nestle's has a social media presence including, of course, a Facebook page. Meanwhile, like any global corporation, Nestle's also does things that attract criticism from environmental activists. Taken together, these two facts virtually guarantee a collision resulting in negative publicity somewhere down the line.

You know you must be getting old when you're bothered by incivility in online forums. But it does bother me, damn it, and not just out of some reflexive dislike of confrontation. I'm worried it reflects something fundamentally wrong with modern society, or at least some of the individuals who compose it. And I'm also wondering whether individuals who are uncivil online may be doing themselves professional damage they're not even aware of.

One of the most interesting things about social media, in my humble op-ed, is the way enterprising nerds have begun to apply quantitative analysis to the uber-complex world of human sentiment -- basically marrying math and emotions. The most recent example I came across is a new social media analytics tool from SAS. But first I must digress about why I find this stuff so fascinating.

Sometimes some faint doings in the outside world filter into the American news, probably by accident and only on slow news days: I remember something about Moscow subway bombings beneath banner headlines about Ricky Martin's shocking revelation that he is the former lead singer for Menudo. More recently something happened in Kazakhrygikstans. I'm not going to criticize the news organizations for dropping the story about the revolution in Kyrgyzstan like a C-Span press conference: in addition to being almost impossible to spell, it is small and poor and doesn't have any oil. But the revolution in Kyrgyzstan is interesting, darn …