It's always nice to wrap up the week on a note of fierce controversy and recrimination, don't you think? Luckily the social media industry provides plenty of both. In the latest round, The Guardian has stirred a PR hornets' nest with a series of articles purporting to show that Whisper, the supposedly anonymous platform for sharing secrets, is secretly tracking the locations of many users, including people who explicitly asked not to be tracked.

Apparently there's a goodly number of people out there who still haven't received the message that stupidly putting stupid stuff on social media can cost your stupid ass a job. This week brought more confirmation that risque social media content can damage your career prospects, in the form of a survey of hiring managers and human resources executives conducted by Jobvite.

Well, that didn't take long. The new social media hotness, Ello, is no longer new or hotness, and is now more a moderately aged "meh," judging by the number of searches for "Ello" from Google Trends.

Roughly one in three British teenagers ages 15-18 have met someone in person after first "meeting" them online, accord to a survey of 1,015 young Brits by Comres. Furthermore 25% of respondents said that the feel happier online than in real life, whatever that means (I thought that "online" was part of "real life" because "real life" is everything we perceive and experience, but what do I know?).

The hospitality industry is embracing social media marketing with offers of special deals and perks for guests who help spread the word online. The latest entry to the field is Hotelied.com, a hotel booking and comparison Web site that gives customers discounted rates based on how many online social connections they have -- the more friends and followers, the bigger the discount. Hotels can then foster relationships with these users to take advantage of online word-of-mouth advertising.

It's October and Christmas is right around the corner, according to marketers at least. And while e-commerce is growing by leaps and bounds, new surveys show that social media still plays a relatively small role in holiday shopping -- although this role is growing at a slow, steady rate.

While news about social media trends should usually be taken with a grain of salt, there may just be something to all the reports that teenagers are abandoning Facebook in favor of Instagram (also owned by Facebook). The latest survey data comes from investment bank Piper Jaffray, which polled U.S. teens about their social media usage in September, and compared the results with a previous survey in March.

Last month's promising employment numbers hold out the possibility that the U.S. economy is moving and hiring is at long last -- hopefully, maybe, God willing, don't jinx it now -- picking up. And if this happy scenario comes to pass we're probably going to see a whole array of new online recruiting strategies which will (following the timeless advice to "fish where the fish are") rely more and more on social media.

Body image issues associated with social media discourage adolescent girls from engaging in physical activity including organized sports, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Flinders in Australia. The unrealistic images of women presented on social media serve to create an unattainable ideal, prompting girls to withdraw from physical activity because they feel embarrassed about their bodies, the study found.

There's been a lot of talk about social media's negative psychological effects (including in this blog) but it can also help make people feel better about themselves, according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State University. They just have to find someone else who's even worse off than they are.