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Ask Giz: The 7 Steps of the Online Break Up [Badvalentine]

Things didn’t go so well, huh, champ? We’ve talked a lot about love, but now it’s time for our resident love doctor to talk about what happens when romance goes south. Here are the steps to breaking up… online.

Breaking up is hard to do, so the song goes, but it can be particularly painful in the digital world. If you find yourself separating from someone you’d created a digital identity with, follow these steps to keep your dignity (and assets) in tact:

1) Change Your Relationship Status If you don’t do it, they will, which makes the preemptive relationship status change the way to go. Holding on to a fake “in a relationship with” could make you look desperate to your ex or any friends who know the truth. Better to cut the cord and move on, sadness and all. If you’re not yet ready to move on and meet others (or don’t want to provoke an online war with your ex), just remove the “in a relationship with” part but don’t actually add “Single” or “Looking for Random Play.” (Yet.)

2) Yank Some Pictures Some people remove all online signs of their relationship, including Facebook photos of the two of them in happier times. If you’re both comfortable with the reminders of your time together, then no harm done (though it may make some future partners wary about why you continue to hold on to and display photos of your ex). If your ex would feel better with no photos online, then by all means respect her or his wishes. Whenever you have a choice, try to choose kindness.

3) To Unfriend or Not to Unfriend Might their feelings get hurt if you unfriend them? Yes, but such is life and love. It’s fine to unfriend someone as long as you don’t do it in a cruel way, like by sending them an evil message telling them that you’re unfriending them due to their bad breath or the way they took nearly an hour to make it through their angel hair pasta. Before unfriending, though, consider whether you might want to date or be friends again in the future. If so, unfriending could be a wrong turn. Is it really that terrible that they might read your status updates or wall posts? Wait, really?

4) Limit Their Access Let’s say you decide to stay Facebook friends but you want some boundaries. Change your privacy settings to either put them on limited profile or to modify their access for specific parts of your profile. You can limit their visibility by altering what they can or cannot see (such as placing an “Everyone but” limitation on new photos).

5) Change Your Passwords I don’t care how much you trust the person. If you shared your passwords while you were together (for some, it’s a sign of intimacy or trust), change your passwords. People sometimes do rash things in fits of jealousy, sadness, depression or revenge. As a sex and relationships columnist, I’ve heard all sorts of stories involving people breaking into each other’s email accounts, bank accounts, Facebooks and more. There’s nothing wrong with protecting yourself and your assets.

6) Save Things You Want Before your ex takes photos you want off of their Facebook (or god forbid their MySpace, if they still have one), copy any photos you want to your computer just in case it gets awkward to ask for them later. Even if you don’t think you’ll want them later on, you might – even if only for the memories. If seeing the photos makes you sad, transfer them to a folder on your hard drive. Still looking at them too often? Save them to an external hard drive. Still peeking? Have a friend babysit your external hard drive until you’re able to move on.

7) Consider Blocking Them Hopefully you’ll never need to block someone, but there are always those few key creepy people. Maybe it makes you feel gross to imagine that they have any sort of access to your life or that you ever kissed them or allowed them to insert Part A into Part B (and not in a cool gadget sort of way). If that’s the case, why stop at unfriending? Block them and move on, as long as you’re okay with not being able to see their profile either (which is what Facebook blocking entails). On Gmail and many other email systems, you can also set up rules to have their emails diverted into a separate folder in case you want to be able to receive emails from them but don’t want their constant emails reminding you of what went wrong when you’re trying to get work done.

Sometimes breakups are necessary and wanted. Other times they are exceedingly sad. If you’re stuck in a real rut of sadness or depression, check out Peter McWilliams’ classic How to Survive the Loss of a Love.

Read more of Dr. Debby’s love advice here during Gizmodo’s Bad Valentine celebration.

Debby Herbenick, PhD is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of The Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, a sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute and author of Because It Feels Good: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. She blogs at MySexProfessor.com.

Gingerbread heartbreak shot by Jared Zimmerman/Flickr used under CC license

Bad Valentine is our own special take on the beauty—and awkwardness—of geek love.

Avast Free Antivirus 5.0 Adds Behavior Monitor, Heuristics Engine, and Improved Performance [Downloads]

Windows only: The newest version of the popular Avast Antivirus is finally available for download. It’s lighter, faster, and more feature-filled than ever, bringing a new behavior shield, heuristics engine, and code emulator to keep you protected at all times.

Apart from its far easier-to-navigate interface, Avast has a few new features that make it hard to turn down. Its new code emulator can emulate a suspicious executable's code, isolated, for use in its new heuristics engine, designed to detect malware that would otherwise be undetectable with normal definitions—in other words, spotting malware by learning what the code does. If you use the pro version, you also get their new sandboxing feature for even further protection.

Apart from the new features, Avast has also lowered scanning times as well as the resources necessary to scan and update—a common issue with antivirus programs that are always running in the background. If you're already an Avast lover (and many of you are), you can either wait for the program to update itself in the near future or go download 5.0 straight from Avast. If you've tried Avast and turned it down before, it may be worth another look—you may find that its former cons (such as the difficult-to-use GUI and resource use) are now more up to your standards.

Avast Antivirus is a free download, Windows only.

Jay's 10 favorite free Mac apps of 2009

Filed under: Features, Macintosh

After Lee posted his excellent list of 10 favorite free Windows apps, I figured I’d jump in on the Mac side of things. 2009 has brought a lot of great new software to the Mac, especially with the introduction of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. We’ve seen everything from hot new browsers to productivity apps to essential system utilities, and they’re all well worth a download. Since Lee included some old standby apps on his list, I’m going to take the same liberty: most of these are new for 2009, but a couple are old workhorses I used more than ever this year.

Without further ado, let’s get to the apps!

Tweetie
This simple, elegant Twitter client from Atebits Software blows everything else in the Twitter arena out of the water. Not only is it attractive, it’s also got the most intuitive UI out there, and includes easy URL shortening and Growl support. Tweetie deserves all the good reviews it’s received. No wonder the iPhone version won an Apple Design Award!

Miro
This excellent video player has really come into its own this year, with updates to version 2 and then version 2.5. Not only can you use it to subscribe to web video channels and podcasts, you can also use it as a BitTorrent client. Using RSS feeds, you can set Miro to download new episodes of a TV show as they come out, and use it to play them, too.

One app for all your video needs? Sounds like top 10 material to me.

Namebench
Another cross-platform gem, Namebench speeds up your Internet connection by finding you the fastest DNS server in your area. You can optimize it for your particular browser, and it’ll give you a results page with a comparison of all servers, and how much faster the best one is, as a percentage. Namebench came out of Google’s “Twenty Percent Time,” where employees work on side-projects one day a week.

Firefox 3.5 Intel-Optimized builds
Love Firefox, but wish it performed a lot better on your Mac? Snag an Intel-optimized version of the latest (non-beta) Firefox release for all the stability (and add-on compatibility) you expect from regular Firefox, but with a little extra speed in the tank. I think you’ll really notice the difference.

Skitch
I couldn’t finish any of my Download Squad posts without Skitch, because I use it for all my screengrabs and resizing. Skitch is the slickest, quickest screen capture tool you can get for free. Just snap, add some text, arrows or drawing if you want, resize, and then drag your new image anywhere you need it.

Google Chrome
Although it’s still only in beta, Google Chrome made a huge splash as the fastest browser you can get on your Mac. Once extension support and bookmark syncing are enabled in the final version, it’ll give Firefox and Safari both a serious run for their money.

Ommwriter
Ommwriter creates a minimal writing environment, free of distractions. It has very few controls or formatting options, which means a lot less to fiddle with instead of writing. It also has a few different backgrounds, and even a selection of soothing music by which to write. Another full-screen writing app I love, although it didn’t come out in 2009, is Writeroom.

Dropbox
For online file storage and syncing, it’s tough to beat Dropbox. It integrates with the OS X Finder, so you can drag files to and from your Dropbox as if they were stored on your hard drive. Dropbox folders are easy to manage and share, and – as if the desktop app weren’t cool enough by itself – there’s also a Dropbox iPhone app.

Fluid
This pick almost isn’t fair, because Fluid is more than one app: it lets you turn any web app into a standalone browser. The power of Fluid might not be immediately obvious, but once you start pulling Google Reader or Gmail down to your desktop, it becomes clear how useful Fluid really is. To get a good idea of some of the sites you can Fluid-ize, check out my list of 10 web apps you should be running on your Mac with Fluid.

Sequential
Sequential is one of the best image viewers I’ve used on the Mac. It can see inside folders and ZIP or RAR archives, and it shows the EXIF data for your photos. It’s fairly light and snappy, especially compared to bulky apps like iPhoto. The real reason I love Sequential, though, is that it’s my favorite comics viewer on the Mac, supporting CBR and CBZ files and making it easy to navigate the pages and view them at any size.

… and there you have my top 10, Download Squad readers! I know I left off a few essentials that you’ll call me on in the comments – VLC and Transmission, especially – but I wanted to hit some lesser-known gems, too.

What’s on your personal top 10 list?

Jay’s 10 favorite free Mac apps of 2009 originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple – Google Chrome – Safari – Google Reader – IPhone