The site was a letdown (facebook.com)

Member Name: davey_26

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	20/10/09 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Millions of people on there, lots of community groups to join

Disadvantages: Difficult to search for people, do i really want to go back over old ground

After being constantly asked the question of whether I have a facebook, I have recently finally relented and signed up. The process of signing up involves providing a few personal details and as optional feature, you can also detail your current place of work, which education institution you attended i.e. schools/colleges/universities. Finally to make yourself recognisable to others, you are then able to upload photos of yourself.

Once I had done that, I had the option of adding everyone who is currently on my msn contact list, or to search for individuals who I might wish to look up.
The reason for providing this additional information about work, schools etc is explained when you attempt to search for individuals. You may find that when searching the name you have looked up brings back hundreds of names. At this point you will need to apply a number of filters to filter out many of the names and leave you with the right one.

Once you have invited someone to become a part of your friends network on facebook and they have agreed, you will then have the opportunity to see when they are online and chat to them using the messenger service provided on the website. Or alternatively they can send you a private message which will appear in your inbox.

In addition to this, you can also search for specific groups of interest and become a member. What this typically means is that the group will have a messsage board operating on there which are then able to contribute to.

However as I began using facebook, it became apparent that the site is fundamentally flawed. For example I might wish to catch up with someone I have not spoken to in years, which means then my search results in hundreds of matches, I can indeed filter but the filtering will only be a success, if that person has included those details in their profile. For instance if I wanted to search for someone called Andy Hawke this is a fictional name I should point out, and they attended Birmingham University between 2001-2004, it will only return such a result if Andy has included his university details on the site.

What this means is I could be skimming through each of the results, only to then ascertain that he doesn't have a facebook. Furthermore this problem is exasperated when you trying to track down friends from further back than that, because of the problem outlined above, compounded by the fact that you might no longer recognise them.

There is also the feeling that if I had wanted to keep in contact with these people I would have and indeed, what use is there of stepping foot into the past?. This is more of a philosophical question though and not really a criticism of facebook itself.

Overall I found this website to be quite a letdown which I know is completely going against the grain of opinion. In the end while not executed poorly, there are too many annoyance for me to carry on with it

Summary: Not a site for me