A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices. Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported by participants. The results of the team’s study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, however preliminary data provided to The Guardian suggests the highest rate of “self-control failures” were tied to social media services.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

Waze this morning has taken the wraps off Version 3.0, which brings Foursquare and Yelp integration to the Android navigation app. It's also bringing a new minimal user interface, and social location stack, meaning more community-currated information than ever.

We've got the full press release and download links after the break.

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President Obama will be hosting his first Google+ hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. In the discussion, the president will be answering questions that were submitted over the past few weeks through YouTube. Google maintains that the White House has had no role in which questions will be selected. Google’s team will instead choose the top-rated questions among those submitted, ensuring there will be several different issues discussed. The event will take place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and is scheduled to last 45 minutes. The hangout will also be streamed on the White House’s web site, and reporters and press cameras not permitted inside during the event. Obama has previously hosted town hall meetings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of which received harsh criticism and claims that the President ignored subjects that drew the most questions.

Read [Google+] Read [CNN]

Twitter announced recently that it now has the ability to, and will begin to, censor content on the social network by country. “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the company said in a blog post Thursday. “Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there.” Twitter gave France and Germany as examples, two countries that ban pro-Nazi rhetoric from being posted on the Internet. Previously, Twitter would have had to delete specific content worldwide in order to prevent it from being visible, but it can now remove content on a country-by-country basis. Read on for more.

The company’s announcement has caused some to worry Twitter might cross a line that is already blurred. For example, the new policy could prohibit a country’s citizens from using Twitter as a means to band together and stage an uprising. No doubt much of 2011′s Arab Spring uprisings were fueled by social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and censorship could have killed the powerful voices that helped topple a number of regimes.

“We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld,” Twitter said. “One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow.”

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Google’s social network Google+ is now open for teenagers, according to Google’s Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz’s announcement in a post today. Everyone who is old enough for a Google Account (13-years-old and up in most countries) can now sign up for Google+. The executive boasted the many security and privacy features of Google+ that help establish the difference between friends, acquaintances and strangers— a must for underage users.

Between strong user protections and teen-focused content, it’s our hope that young adults will feel at home (and have some fun) on Google+. And of course, we do have at least one thing in common with our newest users: we’re both busy growing up.

The Google+ service, he argued, has “awesome features that teens really want” whilst encouraging safe behavior “through appropriate defaults and in-product help.” In addition, abuse-reporting tools are easy to find and use, Horowitz noted. Details on age requirements on Google Accounts are available here. Teens can also get more information on Google+ safety features in the newly launched Google+ Safety Center, with interesting resources available for educators, teenagers and parents.

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Twitter finally appears to be preparing a new wave of attacks on the malicious spammers that have overrun the popular social network during the past year. Web security firm Dasient on Monday announced that it has been acquired by Twitter. ”Since its inception, Dasient has been focused on solving web-scale security problems involving malware and other types of online abuse,” the firm noted in a blog post. “In 2009, Dasient launched its web anti-malware platform, capable of scanning URLs and websites for the presence of harmful content. In 2010, Dasient launched the industry’s first anti-malvertising service to protect ad networks and publishers from the scourge of malicious ads. Over the last year, we have been very active in securing the ads and content of the some of the industry’s largest ad networks and web sites.” The firm is seen as playing a large role in securing new self-service advertising efforts Twitter is preparing to roll out in the near future. A secondary benefit to end users, however, is that the link-spam currently plaguing members of the social network may be quelled as part of Twitter’s efforts with Dasient technology.

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Facebook announced on Tuesday that the company’s Timeline feature will be forced on users “over the next few weeks.” Facebook introduced the Timeline feature last year, which transforms a profile page into a timeline of a user’s life, highlighting photos, posts and life events that help tell the user’s story. Once activated, people will have seven days to preview the Timeline content before it goes live on the account. Last week, Facebook added a feature that enabled apps to populate timelines with new information, such as a virtual passport to share a user’s favorite locations.

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Google is adamant on accelerating work on its Google+ social network. By doing so, the company has already stepped on people’s toes. An upcoming Q&A feature from Google does not seem to be aimed squarely at Quora, a popular question-and-answer website, but the Quora people understandably cann0t be too happy about this development. See, according to VentureBeat, the search company is trying out a new capability called “Ask on Google+” allowing you to ask friends about the topics you are searching for. It is akin to Facebook Questions, with one huge advantage: One accesses it easily at the bottom of one’s search results:

Click the link to ask your friends any question related to restaurants, movies, how to make friends on Google+, or other topics. Your question will automatically be posted to your Google+ stream for your friends to answer.

Granted, it is nowhere near as complete as Quora and it lacks the basic component, a Q&A engine. In its current implementation, asking stuff on Google+ from your search results simply puts up an overlay window with a pre-populated Google+ post related to your search query. For example, if I were searching for “2012 Android smartphones,” clicking the “Ask on Google+” link would create the “Hi there! I have a question about 2012 Android smartphones…” message. You can edit the message, select your audience, or add a location, photo, video or URL. The folks with whom you shared the message will not be able to select from custom choices like with Facebook Answers. Still, it certainly does not mean crowd-sourcing answers from your Google+ friends will not take some allure off Quora and similar services— quite the contrary.

Hardly any companies are able match Google’s ability to tie Google+ features to the dominant search engine and other popular web properties such as Gmail, Picasa and others. In this regard, anything and anyone should be worried indeed. Do not get us wrong, Quora is a popular service, but a question arises as to why folks would continue using it if Google+ provides similar capabilities enriched with integrated Google+ profiles, automatic posts and other perks? Nevertheless, according to a spokesperson for the Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered Company, Google is “experimenting” with the new feature at this stage. No word yet when and if “Ask on Google+” might roll out to all users, but we have a feeling it will be sooner than later.

Facebook on Wednesday evening announced new applications that can be used to populate users’ Facebook Timelines with new information. The initial launch apps include Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest,Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, TripAdvisor and several others. “If you’re a traveler, you can add the Gogobot and TripAdvisor apps to bring a virtual passport to your timeline, and show your friends where you’ve been and share tips about your favorite spots from around the world,” Facebook product manager Carl Sjogreen explained in a blog post. Thankfully, Facebook has added an option that allows users to choose exactly who can see the updates from each application, which means Timelines shouldn’t be too flooded with updates about what an old friend from highschool has been cooking for dinner all week. Sjogreen also said more applications for additional interests will be added over time.

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Adding an entry to the long list of novelty photo apps in the Android Market, SilkenMermaid has introduced TurboCollage - an aptly named app that allows users to make "picture pile" collages in just a few moments, with a surprising amount of control options.

Once you selects images to be included in the collage, the photos can be rotated, resized, scaled, and layered, to create a collage that perfectly matches your vision. If you're looking for a more dynamic, random aesthetic, TurboCollage also has a "shuffle" option, which will randomly reorder your photos for a totally new layout.

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[New App] TurboCollage Creates Fun Picture Pile Collages In Moments was written by the awesome team at Android Police.