Togetherville is a kid-safe social networking site for pre-teens where parents control the friends list for their children. The site include games, art activities, videos, and educational quizzes, and has no links to external sites. If a parent administrator chooses to do so, content from Togetherville can be shared in the parent’s Facebook stream, and parents can add their own Facebook friends to their child’s Togetherville account. Registration is free, but Togetherville currency costs real money, and can be used to buy virtual gifts or games.

Sooner or later it’s bound to happen. One of your Facebook friends thinks that photo of you is just so hilarious. They’ve uploaded it and tagged you. And now it’s there for all your friends to see. You, however, don’t think the photo is all that great. In fact, you hate the photo and wish there was some way to unlink it from your Facebook profile. And there is. You can untag yourself in any Facebook
photo with these simple steps. First, follow the link in the email notification that you probably received when you were tagged. Or else, simply traverse to the photo through your profile. Now look in the lower left-hand corner for the phrase “In this photo.” You will see a list of all tagged Facebook members, including yourself. And next to your name will be a “remove tag” link to click. That’s all
there is to it.

The blogosphere has been all a twitter lately about the rise in popularity in searches for “how to delete my Facebook account.” Here’s one such rant from ReadWriteWeb. If you also want to leave the iconic king of social networking, here are detailed instructions from Leo Notenboom of Ask Leo on how to delete your Facebook account.

The use of Facebook’s new social plugins and its Open Graph initiative grew from an initial base of seventy-five partner sites, to use on over 50,000 websites in just one week. The ability for users to declare that they “Like” a site and tell all their Facebook friends about it, has not only been a huge success, but it has also provoked some government scrutiny over privacy. Last week Senator Charles Schumer of New York wrote an open letter to the FTC, suggesting that federal privacy guidelines be set for all social networking sites. Learn more about why the Senator doesn’t “Like” Facebook’s new features at Mashable.

Google recently announced Google Buzz, a social media platform that integrates social networking into Gmail and other Google products. To check it, login into your Gmail Account and look for Buzz in the left-hand column. Is this going to impact Twitter or Facebook? Will you be jumping on the bandwagon? Let me know what you think by posting a comment at my blog.

In a recent announcement, Facebook has made the default privacy setting for status updates visible to “everyone.” What this means is everyone on the Internet, not everyone of your friends. The reason behind the change is Facebook’s desire to increase it’s visibility in search engines and to compete more directly with Twitter (where public updates are also the default setting.) It’s not hard to keep your old settings, but there is a lot of confusion about their interface and what the term “Old Settings” really means. Learn more at ReadWriteWeb.com .

On October 1, 100,000 lucky users got an invitation to preview Google’s new real-time communication platform: Google Wave. It combines email, instant messaging, chat, project management and social networking in a client that sits within the browser. To learn more, read Mashable’s guide or watch Google’s video .

Follow Friday, often abbreviated as #FF, is a weekly Twitter tradition of calling out your favorite tweeps (Twitter people) as a way of recommendation. According to Mashable , its history can be traced to Twitter user @micah who invented it on January 16, 2008.

For Twitter power users, the single-tasked Twitter Search (http://twitter.com/search/ ) may not be enough of a good thing. TweetGrid allows you to define a custom grid of Twitter search results, such as 1×2 or 3×3, each cell displaying different search results. TweetDeck is a multi-column Twitter client that also gives you the option of displaying multiple search results at once.

Although technically neither spam nor phishing, those aggressive emails from Tagged claiming a friend has sent you photos are certainly pushing the limits of netiquette. Ask Leo explains how Tagged.com got your email address and know your friend’s name, and why you should simply ignore them.