Sitting on a Cornflake

Yes, I’ve finally joined facebook! I can’t really decide what I think of it.. it can be a fairly amusing waste of time (throwing sheep at people, for example), but every single thing you do on there seems to be a new, separate application. There are TONS of these, so of course, most profiles are full of different things.. and a bit of a mess! And for someone obsessed with neatness (and before anyone says anything, I mean online, not my home.. or writing! lol), it’s a bit frustrating!

However, unlike MySpace, you can’t start changing colours and backgrounds.. so at least the profiles stay readable! Mind you, one popular application has skins, which changes it’s appearance, so I’m sure many more will follow.. and before long, facebook profiles will also be a mass of clashing colours, and annoying flashing graphics! (Sorry, ranting again!)

Oh.. searching for friends is also a little odd - if you pop in a name, you get presented with a long list.. but you can’t view their profiles until you add them as a friend. So, if it’s someone you haven’t seen for a while, you can’t wander through the different profiles, and see if you recognise the person in question.

You can however, search for email addresses in your webmail address books.. this has allowed me to find a couple of old friends, which was interesting! It’ll be be interesting to see if where that leads.

So, when is someone going to make the perfect social networking site? You should be able to present basic info to all, then the rest to those you know. It should be possible to divide your friends list into groups, such as ‘friends’, ‘work’, ‘networking’ etc. There should be a basic profile, where everything is nicely laid out, then links to all the other bits.

Plus, of course, no clashing colours and flashing graphics! LOL