Illustration by Monica Fuentes

Shocking news from the college football world today: Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel is "stepping away" from Twitter.

Financial analysts are divided as to whether Twitter will be able to withstand this defection and still somehow stay alive. College football fans are in a panic knowing they won't get the chance to watch Johnny Football embarrass himself on the Internet as only a BMOC Aggie can.

@JManziel2 has entertained fans and foes with tales of Cabo, Mardi Gras, and various NFL games -- key aspects, no doubt, of coach Kevin Sumlin's demanding recommended offseason workout program.

For now, though, we are left with this poignant, trenchant farewell message:

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Keep it going, man.

It seems we've dodged a momentary bullet, readers. After Jeff Balke's recent and scathing take-down, certain of us remain concerned that BangWithFriends.com has generated enough ill-will that it may yet be taken down. We're awaiting word whether or not the site's backers were actually persuaded by Hair Balls's logic -- we know we can toss our weight with the best of 'em -- but, for the time being, we want to reassure you that there are those few dissenting voices that still buttress BangWithFriends' ranks.

That's not to say that we all subscribed to the site's services, but -- like the wooly mammoth or Tower Records before it -- there's something lost when we witness the demise of another beautiful thread of existence. As such, here are five reasons why we need to make sure the site remains for generations to come. It may not be the BangWithFriends we need, but the BangWithFriends we deserve:

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Seriously, I don't even know where to start. Let's just start by saying there is a Web site called BangWithFriends.com (I'm not going to link to it because I'm not) and the purpose of this site is to allow you to tell it what Facebook friends you would like to pleasure (or more likely be pleasured by) and it indicates whether or not they feel the same (fyi, they don't).

It's a relatively simple concept designed to keep your carnal desires hidden from people until the feelings are mutual, because nothing has ever gone wrong when people try to hook up using technology.

The more I thought about this advancement in hooking up, the more I realized what a monumentally bad idea it was.

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Fly away, little Rockets

Big news coming out of the Toyota Center with the Rockets making a big multi-team trade that saw them pick up, among others, Sacramento power forward Thomas Robinson.

The Rockets bid adieu to starter Patrick Patterson, rotation players Marcus Morris and Toney Douglas, and back-up center Cole Aldrich.

This being the modern social-media age, almost every NBA player has a Twitter page to keep in touch with fans. Often when a player is traded, he takes to the Twitterverse to say goodbye to his old fans and hello to the new ones.

Sometimes. As the twittering in the wake of the Rockets deal showed, things can get a little haphazard.

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Yes, these were picked up off the ground along 100 yards of Polk near the Toyota Center, including a cool one from the City of Houston about parking.

The flyers are for parties, parties and more parties, with appearances by Diddy, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Gary Payton, Jay-Z, Casey Anthony, Cassie, Henry Kissinger, Common, 2 Chainz, Art Garfunkel, Jeezy, T.I., Nas, Rick Ross, Rashard Lewis, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant and many more.

No word on if the city has hired a special team to clean all of these off the streets of Houston come Monday morning, or if any of these parties are worth shaving your legs for. I mean, to drink a warm beer 50 yards from where 2 Chainz might be, that's rarefied air.

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Shape up, Houston!

University of Houston president Renu Khator has been known throughout her stint as a chic dresser, in a business-savvy way.

Her fashion style is constantly on display to UH alumni who get the school's magazine; each issue seems to contain a half-dozen or so pictures of Khator on the job.

Nothing wrong with putting some thought into your personal style, but when you go attacking an entire city for looking what you feel is less than its best, well....

Frankly, we never knew Khator had it against chubbies, so much so that she would go on a Twitter rant, a blitzkrieg of never-ending passive-aggressive messages offering to "help" her followers lose weight.

The startling evidence:

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Movie hashtags and mashups are nothing new on Twitter, but on Thursday night (and bleeding over into Friday morning), a series of movie titles mashed up with baseball took over Twitter, at least here in Houston.

It would appear that it didn't actually begin with the home town team (looking back as far as I could, it may have been a Detroit Tiger fan that started it), but once they got started, Astros fans did NOT leave followers wanting. As far as I can tell, #AstrosMovies got started with @KevinBassStache (appropriate).

There were the obvious like The Bourn Supremacy, but others were much more creative. Here are some of our favorites.

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Twitter finally released its much-anticipated video companion app, Vine, last week. The video sharing network allows users to post very short video clips and share them with other users both on their own network and on Twitter. Like Twitter, hashtags help define videos and make them more easily searchable.

Only one hitch: Since their launch, they have been flooded with porn, some of the homemade variety and some more professional stock.

It would be funny if it weren't so predictable. Porn is one of the dominant sources of bandwidth usage on the Internet and has been for a long time. People like to watch other people doing it and any chance they have to add to the vast array of possible options online, they will take it, particularly people in the business of selling porn.

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The National Labor Relations Board, through a series of new rules governing small business and social media, has provided greater protections for employees who speak out against employers online. Expanding existing rules, the NLRB said, "workers have a right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution, whether the discussion takes place at the office or on Facebook," Essentially, it means your boss can't hand you a pink slip for smack-talking the company on Twitter.

A series of cases brought before the board in recent months has illuminated the problem of employer standards when it comes to social media and the Internet and the combined impact of the NLRB rulings is to limit employers' ability to fire or discipline an employee for making what the company considers damaging comments about it online.

And while this rule does offer protection for people bitching about their company around the virtual water cooler just as previous rules protected them around the actual water cooler, this is still a pretty broad ruling and leaves the details to individual cases as to what is okay and what is too much. In fact, the NLRB ruled in favor of the Arizona Daily Star in a case involving a reporter who was fired for tweeting "What?!?!?! No overnight homicide. ... You're slacking, Tucson." and "You stay homicidal, Tucson."

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Lots of people have been fooled online. Some have had entire relationships with people only to find out they weren't the people they thought they were...some not even the right gender. It is as disturbing as it is frustrating to imagine that anyone you speak with on the Internet might not be who they say they are. In fact, in certain situations -- chat rooms, for example -- it's probably best to just assume that the person chatting with you is the exact opposite of how they describe themselves, if for no other reason than to avoid potential embarrassment later. Anyone who has spent any time online understands this is a standard safety precaution.

So, when I read about the incredible details of Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o and the girl he was supposedly in love who died last year and who turned out to be complete fiction, I was fascinated by how everyone was duped, but not terribly surprised.

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