Facebook: It's not so bad (facebook.com)

Member Name: Kitch88

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	11/09/09 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good social interaction, great for finding old friends & organising parties

Disadvantages: Perhaps can be addictive & distracting - particularly when you have work to do

Facebook is the largest social networking site available, with more than 250 million active users at time of writing.

The idea of facebook is that anybody aged 13 and over can register and have their own page, where you can add friends, send messages and submit status updates about what you're feeling or doing (a little bit like twitter).

In my opinion, facebook's two main strengths are it's:
* Photo System: When facebook first emerged, it was the only website I had seen where you could upload photo's and then 'tag' them, this is a simple process where you click on a person in a photo, then type their name into a box and it'll link to their facebook profile and show in their list of tagged photo's
* Events: It has become incredibly easy to organise things, in particular parties, you just start an event (public or private), detail where and when it is, then invite the friends you want to come and they can submit attending or not responses.

This is not to say these are facebook's only strengths, a moderately new feature of being able to live chat (similar to MSN) with people from your friends list works quite well too.
Facebook is also an excellent way of getting back in touch with people you have previously lost contact with, or people with whom you met and enjoyed the company of, but are not friendly enough to hang around with for instance.


The only real negatives of facebook is that people worry that users will become less adept at real social interactions - however I don't beleive this, as facebook is a good way of being MORE sociable, not less.
And the other negative is down to people using the site when at work and reducing their productivity, but this is not the sites fault - merely the users.

All in all it's a very good website, and there are far worse things you could be doing on the net!

Summary: With 250 million active users, at least give it a chance