I've just been poked! (facebook.com)

Member Name: Beanie8844

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	14/09/08 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good messaging sys, photo's, groups can be good

Disadvantages: annoying group and application invites

I started using Facebook when I was at university two years ago because a lot of the people on my course were on it. It is basically a social networking site which enables you to stay in touch with friends by leaving them messages on their wall, sending them messages to their inbox, setting up groups and exchanging photo's.

Setting up your own pages is very simple and only takes a matter of minutes. Once you have completed the process you are free to start searching for friends, the best way I have found to do this is to add somebody who you share many of the same friends with, then you can go straight to their friends list and click 'add as a friend'- a friendship request will then be sent to that person and they can decide whether to accept or decline; don't worry though people very rarely decline. However, I use Facebook to keep in touch with my close friends and organise events, some people just add as many people as they can, including people they may have only met once or twice, the consequence of which is a friend list of about 400+ people!

When you're established on Facebook, after a while people will start approaching you with friend requests because they will have seen you on their friends pages and recognised you're picture - which you will have uploaded when setting up you're page. As well as friend requests you'll get invites to various groups which you can join eg England Supporters or Lower Fuel Prices, there are thousands on Facebook. Another feature is the applications feature, but frankly I find these quite annoying. They're basically little games which get put onto you're page, examples include quizzes, fantasy football etc. These are ok, but when you get sent about ten invitations per day it does get very irritating.

I do like Facebook and when I first started using the site I was quite addicted to it, but know I only use it when I really want to speak to somebody or I'm trying to organise an event, a birthday for example - it allows you to contact a large number of people in a short space of time.

I play and help run for a football team on Saturday and we have setup a group to organise training, talk tactics and generally have a chat; it works brilliantly. We post match reports after games and topics for discussion based on what went wrong and where we can improve - I would definitely recommend people to do this if they are members of a sports team because it really does make the organisational side of things a lot easier and significantly reduces you're phone bill as you don't have to phone and text as much.

Pro's: staying in touch with close friends, joining groups which interest you, looking at photo's people have posted

Con's: friend requests from people you don't know, group and application requests of little interest, they keep changing the layout, employers sometimes look on Facebook so you need to be sensible with what you post, better than Myspace in my opinion

Thanks for reading.

Summary: everyone should have a facebook page