Face-hook (facebook.com)

Member Name: triplecthegame

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	24/02/08 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to keep in touch with friends, some entertaining games

Disadvantages: Reckless spamming on the groups and the applications

In this day of technological advancements the means to keep in touch with your friends have gone through what has to be said are some pretty nifty developments, just think back to the mid-90's when if you wanted to speak to a friend, for most of society quite literally there were 3 options, phone them, write them, or get off your backside and go and see them. As time has gone on the development of Mobile Phones, then e-mail, and then SMS Texting have meant that its a lot easier to speak to anyone, and now comes the dawn of the social networking Site.

Ask anyone in the internet know what a Social Networking site is and they'll probably throw back one of 3 names at you - myspace, facebook or bebo, in this review we shall be taking a look at the one I personally use the most: facebook. Go back a couple of years and I used to believe that the in-thing to have on the web was a myspace account, you could create your own page, talk freely with friends upload pictures and also dodgy .wav files for everyone to listen to when they looked at your page. Then my ex-boss sent me an e-mail asking me to join facebook, I was sceptical at first but then joined and left it alone, not adding anyone onto my account other than said ex-boss for the best part of a year and also never logging into it. Then move onto when I moved into a new shared house, the discussion of keeping in touch was raised and we all swapped mobile numbers, but the question of whether or not you had credit or not came up, before you knew it it was arranged that we'd message each other on facebook should something be needed and I was back on again.

So what is a Social Networking site? Put basically its a place where people can join up, add their friends and discuss things with each other, whilst also being able to keep them up to date on the latest happenings in their lives, through either regular updates on a blog, uploading photos or just updating their status (more on that later), and all of this can be done now by people with no prior knowledge of how to create a site from scratch. Because even the biggest technophobe could make their own page the concept boomed first with myspace and then with facebook, which has now taken over as the main choice for any kind of Social Networking. Basically put, if someones just made friends with you and you want to get to know more about them without having to actually ask 20 questions just go look on their facebook, it'll all be there.

The sign-up process to facebook is quite straight-forward, it'll ask you for an e-mail address, a password and the usual basic information and that's it, you can then go on about updating your site, unlike myspace you can't embed codes into your page so there's no way anyone can put annoying music on their page which you then can't turn off without first finding it. Your profile itself has options to put in details about where you were educated, where you went to work, which network you wish to belong to (again more on that later), what interests you, along with favourite books, movies, music and quotes. Once all this is done all that's left is for a picture of yourself to be uploaded (not a necessary factor though) and you're up and running.

Adding friends couldn't be easier - just search for their name and then there'll be a link to 'Add as friend', once that's been clicked on its down to the person in question to accept you and then so long as they say yes you're on their friends list. Methods of communication between friends originally comes from just 2 ways - either send them a private message or you can 'write on their wall' which is basically a public way of talking to someone. But there's more to the site than just adding friends and talking to them - 2 facilities that are greatly featured are the groups and the applications facilities, which I'll go into now.

Groups are very similar to the old Yahoo Groups set-up in which someone can create a group about anything they feel particularly interested in and then invite people to join up or make it open to the public, there then will be a messageboard in which people can chat about any old thing and a second forum style board in which people can post and reply to specific topics, and finally there is the option to upload videos and photos to the groups as well. The big fall-back on the groups side of things is that you will find people quite regularly spamming the group with links to either adult-style sites or referral sites, if the creators of groups are on the ball then these posts are usually deleted but if its a big group (some of these places have over 100000 members), its more than likely that the message will just stay on the board which is quite annoying when you're looking for other peoples posts about things you're interested in.

Applications are the second big thing on the site, they range from games to trivia quizzes to means to post music videos to random quizzes deciding all types of things including but not limited to 'when you are going to die', 'what your husband/wife's name will be', 'how many football hooligans you could take in a fight', 'how slutty are you?' and 'how big is your brain?' - some of these applications are immense fun (such as I've got an account with hobowars that has been embedded into the site and I'm regularly on that), but some of them are blatant adverts for movies/tv shows (right now there are applications on site based on indiana jones, transformers and rambo - all with the intentions of getting you to buy the flick) and believe it or not those aren't the worst of the bunch. You'll find the worst are the quiz type applications where you'll add it to your profile, answer all the questions and then before you get your answers it'll ask you to invite 20 friends to also add the application, its annoying to be asked to invite people - and just as annoying to log on to facebook and find 10-15 requests to add applications - which then have to manually be rejected one by one.

Onto the random musings of the site, well firstly you can change your status to whatever you wish by that basically its a small box in the top right hand corner where it will show 'insertyournamehere' and then a blank box for you to update it - this will then be shown at the top of your page and to everyone on your friends list, but believe me this can get you in trouble - a friend of mine announced her pregnancy on the site before telling her parents, forgetting that one of her friends on the site was her live at home little brother - you can imagine the fun that occurred after that! Then there's the networks option, where you can join up to any city you want (though its expected you'd join the city nearest to where you live), the school/uni you're attending or where you're working - this does very little other than put a little bit under your name telling everyone else which networks you're in.

Site navigation itself is quite easy, though put too many applications on your page and it will slow down something rotten - obviously because you're taking up more bandwith but that still doesn't stop some people - plus that can get really annoying as the wall on people's profiles is always right at the bottom, meaning that you have to wait a while sometimes for it to load up. Privacy settings on the site are a bit of a pain to find but once you do they are handy - you can set your profile so that no-one can see your profile unless they are your friend, and you can do the same with your photos, plus if there's someone you really don't want to talk to on the site there is always the option of blocking them completely so that they can't ever see anything you've said or done on the site.

All in all the site isn't that bad if you take it for what it is, a bit of fun where you can attach games to your profile to be more interesting, but don't expect it to be all the bells and whistles that the press about it seem to think it is, because you will be disappointed.

Summary: Not a bad site, just not an amazing one either.