Is this really Social Networking? (facebook.com)

Member Name: helencb

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	16/10/07 (235 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice application features, great way to keep in daily contact with friends and family

Disadvantages: Might be a little addictive for some; potential data security issues

Facebook is a relatively new social networking site, having only existed for around three years. It was started by a Harvard College graduate and was initially for Harvard students only, but this was quickly opened to other colleges and for a year or so it has been open to anyone with an email address. The website allows you to seek/maintain contact with friends, have conversations, send private messages, add mini applications, share photographs and join groups or networks which may be purely for fun or for professional purposes.

Signing up is simplicity itself. You simply select the email address you wish to use, which might be your work email (probably not recommended), university or college email or just a private email address. Registering takes less than one minute and you will get a confirmation email to the email address you have chosen. Personally I would use the email address you use the most for corresponding with friends and family. Once you follow this link to complete your registration. At this stage you will find out if any other friends have invited you to join or are already on Facebook and you can complete some basic profile information. Finally you select your main network; usually the city or town closest to where you live, but this can also be your employer (careful!) or your college/high school/university.

Facebook is for all ages, although there are a high proportion of students/young people on the site, unsurprisingly given its roots in college students.

All users on Facebook have a kind of home page. Initially this is very bland and you may wonder what happens next once you have added a few friends etc. However once you start to explore, there are lots of possibilities. Your profile does show all your personal information as provided by you, including address and telephone information although some aspects can be made viewable by friends only. You should exercise reasonable caution here as anyone in the same “network” as you (in my case Nottingham – lots of people!) can view your profile in full. However, on the safety side, unless you have added someone to your Friends network or they are in your area network, they will be unable to view your profile at all (although you can search to see if someone you know is actually on Facebook).

Users can add and share photos from their home pages and in fact Facebook has rapidly become one of the largest sites for photo uploads on the internet. These can be grouped into albums, similar to other photo sites. Users can also update their status field with a brief expression on mood/location etc and the Wall facility allows users to leave public messages for each other.

Unlike earlier “networking” sites such as friendsreunited.co.uk, Facebook is a lively and active site and the large majority of members are regular visitors to the site, updating their profiles, communicating with friends and adding pictures.

The majority of Friends in my entourage are family, friends and current work colleagues although I have managed to get in touch with one or two friends who I had lost contact information for (and changed mobiles and moved house so they couldn’t have found me!)

I find the messaging feature is as useful as any email account for quick messages to friends and family. In addition the “News feed” can be very useful when you log on – to let you know what is going on in people’s lives and provides an easy way of navigating to their profiles should I want to leave a message.

Personally I am not using the site to look for new friends, although this would also be possible, either through a random “poke” of someone in your network, or more likely because you join a “group”.

A “Group” is essentially a collective home page around a given theme. This could be a work related group e.g. De Vere Hotels, or an interest or geographic based group, e.g. Historic Royal Ayr, or the Alfa Romeo Appreciation Society to name but three of mine. I find most groups are pretty inactive overall, although some do command large numbers of members especially if they are making a statement about a current issue.

All of this sounds pretty nice but perhaps it is sounding rather bland too. However to liven things up, Facebook now has thousands of applications which can be added to your profile and the opportunities are endless. Anyone with the necessary skills can write an application that will interface with Facebook and you can add and remove these at your leisure. One of the most popular games is Scrabulous which allows users to play scrabble against each other – games can of course go on for days and weeks depending on the availability of the players, but you can have several games ongoing at once, as indeed I do with several review writing friends!

Another of my favourites is the hugely addictive “puzzlebee”. This is based very simply on jigsaws submitted by members and with varying levels of difficulty. Each day there is a Daily puzzle and a mystery puzzle as well as thousands of new puzzles created by members. I realised I am not the only one needing my morning jigsaw fix when this application, created in Australia, was down for nearly 24 hours last week – and addicts were desperate for the application to be up and running again!

The applications are far too numerous to mention here, but there are a lot of quizzes which might be personality quizzes or general knowledge/movie type quizzes which can be compared with your friends network. I also enjoy the geographic type applications and I have lost many an evening trying to better my score on the Traveller IQ test. You can also add mini games and there are lots of applications inviting you to send all manner of things and interactions between friends, such as a round of drinks, water bombs, and a host of others, none of which I find particularly attractive to me, despite their huge popularity in general .

Overall I do enjoy spending time on Facebook, communicating with friends and family electronically and wasting time on addictive applications! There have been some scares regarding security of data, and some changes to Facebook’s data policies as a result, but as with all things as long as you are careful with information and data then I don’t think there is a major cause for alarm.

I did have a bit of a debate in the pub with a bunch of 35-45 year olds the other night (I don't spend all my time on Facebook..) about whether sites like Facebook are in fact good for communicating in general and do they in fact detract from the ability to communicate in young people. I think the loudest opposition to sites like facebook were from people who did not actually know what it was about, personally I can see little harm in using the internet to share more of our day to day lives with each other, particularly as families and friends might be more dispersed than they used to be

Now, I think it’s my move on Scrabulous…..

Summary: It's the future...!