Are You Addicted to Facebook? (facebook.com)

Member Name: GingerGirly

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	05/09/09 (35 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good to keep up with old friends.

Disadvantages: Addictive

Facebook is one of the many social networks now available on the internet. Facebook is the best I have found, as Bebo is more for younger users and MySpace just gets confusing. Facebook is available to anyone over the age of 13 (I believe) and allows you to create a simple profile of yourself on which you can add friends, add photos and videos and join groups.

---To Start With---

First of all you must sign up to Facebook. To do this you must provide your first name, last name, email address, password and date of birth. You need to provide your email address because that then becomes your username, and Facebook use it to inform you of any notifications happening on your account. The reason behind providing your DOB is because they need to check on the ages of people joining.

---After That---

After having joined you get to your profile, which at first will be pretty blank. You then need to search for friends. You can search by the name and by the school/company. After this you can then change the settings on your page, you can make it so it is visible to everyone or you can only provide certain information for everyone (your name and your friends list). You can also provide information on your "Info" page, such as your relationship status, your contact information, your favourite things and shows the groups you have joined. You also need to choose a profile picture, this can be off anything, you, your friends, a cartoon, and it doesn't matter, though it does have to be clean.

---Advantages---

Facebook is an easy, free and simple way to keep in contact with your friends and family, especially if they live overseas and you just want to see what they are up to and how their life is going. It is easy to upload photos and videos, and easy to keep them private as you can change the settings of each photo album to see who can view it. Facebook is also reasonably safe; as long as you make sure you have changed the settings so it is private. It also allows you to accept or decline people who add you as a friend, as it will appear on your requests page. And I would recommend you only accept people who you know and trust. Anything that happens on your profile will be told to you through a notification, a little red box popping up at the bottom right hand side of the screen; this includes people tagging themselves in your photos, people commenting on anything and anyone who has accepted your friend request.

---Disadvantages---

The layout of Facebook does keep changing so you get used to one and then the next day they have decided to change it again. It also has a whole load of stupid quizzes and applications that do keep appearing, which can be a bit annoying. It can also become slightly addictive as you can become obsessed with checking on your profile and checking what other people are up to.

---Opinion---

Facebook does it job as a social networking site, and it is easy and simple though it does have its downfalls as everything does. The layout has to be the main one of these. It's good to keep in contact with your friends especially when at university or further in the future. Otherwise we might end up forgetting people who were once our closest friends.

Summary: Free, easy and a good way to keep up with friends