Most of us are aware of the dangers associated with posting lewd and inappropriate pictures to Facebook. But what about the many family friendly photos you upload to your profile? Thanks to a relatively new Facebook decision, not even your well-thought-out profile pictures are safe. Cheryl Smith, a consultant who blogs at Culture Smith Consulting, raised the alarm today after her husband was served up an ad for “Hot Singles” complete with her picture!

How is this so? By default, Facebook users have been opted into a new Facebook Ads program which places your image in select advertisements based on partnerships (read a profitable selling of your likeness) that Facebook has made.

According to Facebook:

Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends.

While most users would be OK with their likeness being used to advertise a product that they are a fan of on Facebook like Snickers or the World Wildlife Fund; fewer would likely be happy to see their profile picture being used to pimp dating services and the like.

Fortunately it’s very easy to opt out of this asinine decision by visiting the “News Feed and Wall” section of your Facebook settings. Cheryl Smith, the aforementioned “Hot Single,” has more detailed opt out instructions available for those who need them.

For a company that was just criticized for calling dibs on everything posted to Facebook; enabling this feature for advertisers, especially without an announcement to users, flies in the face of its attempts to work with users for an agreeable environment.

If you don’t want to end up with a slew of vulgar wall posts or having your boss and coworkers think you model for singles dating websites on the side, you best opt out pronto!

Clarification: There are many innocent uses of your profile picture by Facebook that fall under this opt out form including using your profile picture on Fan Pages and on Fan modules (like the one to the right of this article). The trouble comes when Facebook lets a company advertising “Hot Singles” use your profile picture because you have not taken steps to become a fan of “Hot Singles” like you would for WalletPop or any other company with a fan page on Facebook.

Hi5, the third largest social networking site in the world,  has recently laid off almost 15 percent of its employees, a move to cut expenses in this gloomy economic condition where industries from all sectors including the Internet field have been experiencing dramatic financial slow down.

According to a high ranking official of the company, this move is an attempt to cut expenses in order to survive in this global economic crisis which had caused even the proud Wall Street to stumble upon its feet.

According to the latest figure, the company has also experienced low rates of unique visitors which had also forced some major sponsors to pull out their commercials and other kinds of advertisement posted in the webpage.

The reason for the financial throes experienced by most social network sites is the low advertising revenue which is just a domino-effect of a weak economic condition.  Since most companies from all sectors are tightening their belt, advertising costs have been greatly reduced to reduce burn rates and limit expenses.

In a statement released by the company’s vice-president in marketing department Mike Trigg, “the move is a pragmatic decision in order to survive in this ever-changing environment, and in order for a business to grow, restructuring should be done in the company.”

Meanwhile a source who asked for anonymity had said that most of the people who had been laid off came from HR and Design department.

According to a recent survey, Hi5 ranks third from the most popular social network sites.  The top placer is Facebook and then closely followed by MySpace, both of which have been considered as the most popular community sites in North America.

Ning Inc.  the brainchild of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen — today announced that it is adding support for the OpenSocial standard to the more than 500,000 social networks created by its users.The OpenSocial initiative was launched by Google Inc. and MySpace.com Inc. in November to create APIs that developers can use to build applications that can run across multiple social networks and other Web sites.

The OpenSocial support allows new applications like file sharing, poll creation and e-commerce to be added to social networks created on Ning, the company noted in a blog post. Ning added that 30 OpenSocial applications are available on the site.

Everything was going fine for the web — the financial world had been unwinding its overleveraged excesses for nearly a year without nary a ripple into Silicon Valley — until the launch of HoffSpace, a social network revolving around the oogachaka-ing, burger-wagging actor.

Some bloggers called it a bizarre nightmare. Others decried it as the end of social networks. They were probably joking. But they were right.

Hoffspace showed once and for all what the web sector had fought so hard to admit: These social networks had finally expanded a niche too far. No longer was it possible to argue that one day social networking sites would be anywhere near as good at making money as they were at expanding, fractal-like, into a grey goo of trivial matter.

Social networks spent too much time trying to build audiences without building a solid business model. The thinking was, let thousands of startups innovate in thousands of ways and one of them will stumble onto something big. The way eBay did with online auctions, or Google did with a better search engine.

But even the site voted most likely to succeed is still punting when it comes to financial success. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a German paper this week that the site won’t have a business model for three years. “Growth is primary, revenue is secondary,” he said. On the face of it, that statement isn’t absurd. But coming last week, it sounded blindly out of touch. Facebook will surely survive, but smaller sites looking to it as a role model probably won’t.

This was the week when the Internet sector realized that not only are the good times over, but that much of the room we had for innovation is also gone. The time to experiment around with big, audacious ideas is passing. The invoice for that luxury is now due, and companies will have to either pay up or be so well-funded, like Facebook, that they can still afford tinker a bit. Money is what everyone is expecting from startups, simply because there is suddenly so much less of it around.

Of course, one thing that would help the sector would be if a major social networking company were to give enough of a peek into its books to show it has healthy cash flows, even a robust operating or net profit. But sites like Facebook and MySpace have been suspiciously shy about their financials so far, so that’s not likely to happen.

Many of these sites — focused on social networks or widgets or other mere embellishments to the web that emerged over the past few years — aren’t going to make it. Some with a smart focus, like LinkedIn, will muddle through. A few will be bought out cheap; others will live on as labors of love.

This is the destructive part of that celebrated and magical creative-destruction formula. A lot of areas in tech are probably going to find ways to keep growing, if more slowly: mobile advertising, perhaps, or cheaper, more efficient on-demand software.

After months of speculation, MySpace relaunched its music site in the U.S. with the support of the four major recording companies. The new site comes with free streaming music and the ability to create and share playlists. MySpace needed to revamp the site, as we wrote about in today’s paper, to keep up with fast-moving music upstarts such as iMeem and Last.fm.

Reviews so far have been mixed. It’s like Napster… with a business model, says AllThingsD. You can tell the lawyers got out of the way, says paidContent, because “if the song is in the catalog, you can listen to what you want, as many times as you want, in any order you want, without interruption.”

But it’s still too cluttered, says Silicon Alley Insider. That’s fine if MySpace Music wants to just keep its current audience happy. Not so good if it wants to be the central music stop on the Internet. Just 14% of people online have accessed music via social networks, according to the NPD Group. That leaves a lot of people who haven’t found their social network music hangout yet and could make MySpace their place.

We’ve been playing around with it this morning and found that searching for some songs or a particular artist can be a challenge, an experience shared by Sonal Gandhi, an analyst at Jupiter Research, who told us she had the same problem, even with some of the featured artists.

“It’s not a full offering,” she said. “In the Web world, companies launch and improve on it, and over time, it becomes better. That’s MySpace’s strategy.”

It’s also not clear how to buy a song for some of the artists, something others such as Idolator have experienced when trying to buy the Top 10 digital tracks. Amazon is powering the e-commerce portion of the site, which one would think would be well-oiled since it is one of the few ways to get hard cash.

Matt Graves, vice president of marketing at iMeem, the music-centric social network, said it’s great that MySpace lets users build playlists. But the constraints MySpace appears to place on the playlist, such as limiting the number of songs and restricting where people listen to the music, may be a problem for many.

“On iMeem, the length of your playlist is limited only by your imagination,” he said.

Of course, iMeem and others have a stake in the MySpace launch too: They hope that MySpace will bring a lot of attention to music social services without sucking up all the advertising dollars.

– Michelle Quinn and Swati Pandey