Social networking makes you live longer - official

Social networking sites: apparently they can help you find love, get that dream job and even, we're now told, live longer.

That's the claim made in a press release put out today by, you guessed it, a social networking site. The site's for independent financial advisors and it's got together with 'Internet expert and psychologist' Graham Jones to let us all know about the health benefits of sitting in front of our computer monitors.

You might be able to buy the psychological stuff - feeling better about yourself by chatting to like-minded people and so on.

But Jones goes further: "Research suggests that being involved in social networking sites could lead to physiological changes which make you live longer".

Curiously, there's no reference for this research. I had, an admittedly brief, scout around Google but couldn't find anything to corroborate the claim.

I suspect this could be a case for Dr Ben Goldacre and his excellent Bad Science column in The Guardian.