Log on for a minute, stay for hours (facebook.com)

Member Name: cher_2004

Product:	facebook.com
Date:	28/10/09 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great way to link up with old friends and make new friends.

Disadvantages: can be slow and unreliable

FACEBOOK is a very addictive social networking site.

No joke i find myself logging on to my facebook account several times a day.

Its a fantastic way of catching up with friends you have made throughout your life. OK, so a high number of people that want to add you are people, you don't really remember, from schools.

So they get to search for you and send you a request to add you as a friend, which you don't have to accept. If you are not sure if you do actually know this person you can check their friends list to see if you have any friends in common.

People are not always aware when they first become a member that you can have a public profile or a private profile, if you have a private profile this means people can search for you but they cant read anything on your home page, a public profile means anyone can read anything about you.

Also when you add friends, you can chose a privacy level for each friend, for instance, you may want to have work colleagues on your friends list but you may not wish them to be able to see photo's you have on there of you, or you may not want them to read your status updates (especially if they are work related) this being the case you can enter your privacy settings along the top bar and chose which level of content you want each friend to be able to have access through. BE WARNED, i have seen many cases of comments related to work, leading to formal warnings in the work place, so that is something to keep in mind.

Facebook has it's own chat programme (instant messaging) which is great, and you can also control who can see that your online. However, facebook chat very often doesn't work properly which can at times be really frustrating.

You can chose which alerts you are notified about, for example....Joe Bloggs and john smith are now friends, this means you can limit the amount of information listed in the news feed.

You can sign up to applications where other members get to rate you or tell you if they think you are hot.

There are many highly addictive games you can play through facebook, virtual farming games, and cooking games, and yoville etc. A couple of minutes soon become several hours.

I love facebook, i have managed to catch up and chat with many friends i met whilst travelling years back, people who i would never have had the opportunity to catch up again with without social networking sites.

I am registered with other social sites but i find facebook by far the better site.

There is a minimum age restriction on this but i work in a primary school and know of many children under the restriction limit who have accounts.

Just remember, public profiles means everyone can get access to what you have written, that includes your boss, so be careful.

Great site but seriously needs to sort out its frequent glitches.

Summary: No1 social networking site with its on instant messaging and access to addictive games