It's a tool for wasting time and quite good it is to.

But at the moment facebook is valued at $10 billion!?! Yes $10 billion... that's more beer than pubstandards could drink in 100 lifetimes meeting every night! Obviously that is ludicrous and if the idiot doesn't sell up now then he'll quickly discover once this fad is over it will be worth 10p. (and I won't buy him a beer!)

The sole purpose of Facebook is the Scrabulous application.

The single best thing about Facebook is the feed. For me it serves as the Flickr/Twitter/etc for my set of friends who aren't massively into technology. Why do I like Twitter? Ambient intimacy.

I feel like I get most from Facebook with the set of friends who fit somewhere between best friends and associates - a group I'd like to see more but just don't have time. I bumped into my friend Stef at d.construct, for example, who I'd not seen for 5 years because he lives in Birmingham. Despite all that time I had dozens of questions ready about his daughter, company and mutual friends who I'd noticed him mention on Facebook. As with all the best web services it touches my life in the real world.

I've got criticisms aplenty for Facebook, the biggest being its closed nature, but until they have a sensible revenue stream I'm guessing that the data will remain walled in. Fingers crossed for a magic business plan...

I will openly admit that Facebook felt like an exclusive fad for a while. I got into it while it was still a college student networking solution. The simplistic nature of it prior to opening the software was what really appealed to me; MySpace was far too gaudy for my tastes. Slowly, Facebook is going that way as well, although I don't feel it will ever get as bad. I like the thought of communities outside of these social networking sites, which is part of the reason I finally got my blog established (which, by the way, thanks for stopping by).

P.S. I'm presently doing my hosting through GoDaddy's services, which I'm fairly pleased with at the present time. For a virtual host of 100GB/1TB storage/transfer, I'm paying roughly USD$7/month. What are you looking for in a hosting service?

yo frances,

a good friends of mine that i met in real life forwarded me this http://tinyurl.com/3avxd8. i'm still reppin' email over here!! :o

i'm gonna get a http://www.mosso.com/index.jsp account when i get some free time to transfer my sites.

hope you're well!

As fads go, Facebook is pretty heavyweight - what with twice as many photos hosted (according to their Head of Platform at FoWA) than every other major photo hosting service on the internet put together. Apparently, they're doing something right. That's why they've got as many users they have, and thats why they get 20-50 clicks per day per registered user. Ch-ching!

according to this months .net photobucket is the king of photo-sharing?

'it's official: flickr will be adding video soon. whether it will be able to compete with youtube is questionable, but the option to store videos and use the same tags and albums as you do for your photo collection will be a significant improvement. bizarrely, the king of the photo-sharing market is still photobucket, which holds a 43 per cent share - massive compared to flickr's 6.4 per cent. flickr is growing fast though, and it's loyal community adores it.' - p20, issue 168

maybe the study doesn't take into account facebook - after all it's not exactly public is it. i'm not a member, i can't view any photos.

I'll link this place when I can be arsed to update them again. Will you link me or is my whinge pit too low brow?

Facebook is awful, I don't think anyone really feels that it enhances their life.

It makes mine a lot worse.

"Can’t I just have one home and this can be it?"

You could.

Though think about if you had: GMail, LinkedIn acct, Flickr, FaceBook or MySpace, SixApart blog, and possibly other social networking or online storage/sharing services ... Maybe you might like a central application to access it all and make life easier? (If you use such applications or services.)

Maybe Google's OpenSocial will be that application to make it easier for many?

...

Google Announces the OpenSocial API [O'Reilly Radar] http://tinyurl.com/28m59r

Friends at work keep asking when I'm going to join FB, and while I do have a number of other profiles on other services (I signed up to see what the hype is all about), I much prefer my own little patch of green on the 'net (www.farfromfearless.com).