Seems like every day there's more news of layoffs in the tech sector and beyond, and if you're one of the survivors worried about your job security, startup founder and CEO Kevin Merritt offers some pointers on what to do before the pink slip lands on your desk. His most unexpected piece of advice?

Start exercising. We all know that discrimination is illegal for most reasons and unethical for other reasons. But if you've watched 60 Minutes, you know that's not how humans behave. With comparably qualified candidates, the attractive, fit people are usually offered the job. What are employers looking for in prospective employees? Someone who will get the job done. If you look like you are full of energy, the perception is that you will get the job done.

Even if getting in shape doesn't help you land a new job, it will at least replace feelings of layoff rejection with pride about your hot bod. The rest of Merritt's advice is just what you'd expect: update your professional skills, reduce household bills, start a blog about your area of expertise, and work your online and offline social networks. What are you doing to depression-proof your career? Let us know in the comments. Photo by bryanesque.

I'm a pretty keen Twitter user, but I must admit the idea of using the social networking site to automate my house hadn't occurred to me. However, if this video is anything to go by, the results are quite impressive in a geeky way.

Well, that was quick. Google has killed off Lively, the 3D avatar environment it launched with some fanfare back in June. The service will be switched off by the end of the year, a post on Google's blog confirmed. It's useful proof that even the Google branding can't make a 3-legged dog -- which is how most 3D online environments still come across -- an attractive proposition.

Twitter aggregator Kvetch collects humorous complaints from Twitter users, displays them at random, and lets site visitors vote on how funny they are. Higher-rated comments are supposed to appear more often, though when I checked in the volume of tweets being drawn upon didn't seem large enough for that to make much difference. Obviously, this is a huge potential time sink, but it's also a useful way of coming up with new complaints and insults to share among your friends and colleagues.

Social networking sites continue to flourish: Facebook signed up 30 million new users in the last three months. But while sites like Facebook and MySpace might have started out seeking to enrich your private life, they're increasingly being tapped into by work-centred applications. This week, Facebook and Salesforce.com announced a partnership that will see Salesforce.com's web applications - for distinctly non-leisure-like tasks such as tracking sales leads - made available within Facebook itself. Executives from both companies (pictured above with a demo app looming behind them) clearly think that's a good idea, but even after watching them spruik it, I'm not so sure.

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Earlier this month, we explained how to get rid of Twitter's US Election 2008 bar. Twitter made some interim tweaks to the bar, but has now recoded it so that once minimised, it stays minimised -- a useful result if you're looking to save screen real estate and don't want to mess with AdBlocker. If you do want to kill it altogether, reader Mike Campbell points out that you need to change the original AdBlocker code to read as follows:
twitter.com#div(class=elections-promotion)

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Flock, the social-focused browser built on the Firefox codebase (and now powered by Firefox 3), has released its final 2.0 version. The newest edition includes all the improvements from the 2.0 betas, but adds much-requested integration with MySpace networking, support for the Media RSS protocol on sites that Flock doesn't already hook into, and custom themes that work much like Firefox 3. New to Flock? Check out Jason's screenshot tour for a look at the basic features included in the 2.0 release. Flock is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

One of the challenges with Facebook's recent redesign is that some applications (such as Wordscraper) don't appear on the new applications menu or main apps list. Fortunately, this can be fixed through some mildly obscure settings. Visit the edit apps page, find your application and click on Edit. Go to the Bookmark tab and make sure 'Bookmark [appname]' is selected. Click Okay, and the application will now appear in the pop-up applications menu, where you can drag it to your preferred location, as well as the front page in the applications are.

Twitter has fixed one of the more annoying glitches in its mobile site, adding access to replies (messages preceded by an @ symbol and your Twitter name). While there are dozens of alternate Twitter clients available, the basic mobile site is still useful, and this is a sensible (if overdue) enhancement.

Telstra's own BigPond Twitter support channel has come in for a fair degree of criticism from Twitter users for only offering a "contact us" canned response to queries. An alternate way of tracking the telco on Twitter is via the WeLoveTelstra channel, a bot which picks up any tweets which mention Telstra. Unsurprisingly, that gives it a somewhat negative slant -- people are far more likely to point out service faults than praise Sol's crew to the skies -- but it's an interesting perspective on Telstra's performance and activities.