Facebook www.facebook.com Review

“I started looking at facebook as part of a uni thesis...”

Written on: 08/04/2008 by PaulAdams30 (1 review written)

Good Points
Popular, versatile.

Bad Points
Difficult to un-register, security issues, invisible to non-family/friends, complicated, takes up a lot of time.

General Comments
I started looking at facebook as part of a uni thesis on the effects of social networking sites on society such as www.facebook.com My study led me to look at a number of other sites, including MySpace, Bebo, faceparty and the very new facemass.co.uk.

Social networking is on the up and we seem to spend more and more time online, reading about other people - and perhaps more importantly, telling other people about us - something that facemass.co.uk is looking to capitalise on.

facebook's greatest asset is its size and its ability to offer great flexibility through applications designed by non-facebook employees. The flip side of this, however is its ability to become very complicated very quickly. Ask an over 50 non-web savy user to find something on the internet and they will probably succeed using a simple search engine such as google. Ask them to begin using facebook and they will probably be scared off by its sheer enormity and complication. MySpace lost out to facebook partly because it allowed users to fully customise their MySpace profile - great on the face of it until you struggle reading anything amidst the patterns and colours splashed boldly and LOUDLY across your page. facebook avoided this but I do think it is danger of going the same way as MySpace - becoming over complicated and scaring many people off.

Further bad points such as making it difficult to cancel your account (Is that not illegal?), showing off your date of birth (as well as other security issues) and eating into every minute of every waking day makes facebook a 'dangerous' game.

New sites will always try to close the gaps in the market and facemass.co.uk is no different. Very new (there's only about 5 faces on there at the moment), facemass tries to be a simple facebook. Will it succeed? Maybe, like facebook, it will become a victim of its own success.