As an example, my brother’s girlfriend used the site as the sole repository for her photos. Then, her account was suddenly deleted because she was falsely reported for spamming. Bang! All gone! No-one to whom she could appeal. No backups. No process. That’s the danger of Facebook. It’s a rapacious company with a rapacious CEO with a rather unsavoury business model. Better that an Open social network be formed based on open protocols, peer to peer networking and so on. It’s being worked on.

So i’m forced into this method of communication, and then what? I have to rely on it. I have to make sure it forwards all pertinent happenstances to me because otherwise people will say “Well, I sent you a message on Facebook!”.

So, in summary, I think it’s a double edged sword. There’s plenty of people that I would never meet or talk to that social networking sites enable, but equally many of the times when someone would otherwise call me and we’d have a long chat about stuff, or at the least drop me a text and start a conversation that way, it is now degraded into a single Facebook invite, to which I replay “Yes” “No” or “Maybe”.

You can argue that’s the same thing, but if I was sending emails, I’d just go through and add everybody from my address book to the one email.

I would equate Facebook and email as the same thing really. I’ve often heard people say they wish they could use Facebook *as* their email rather than having to log into two things.

That’s why nobody likes a mass email, and why people always begin them, “Sorry about the mass email…” It’s impersonal. But at least an email is arriving directly at MY address. A Facebook invite is a mass email that doesn’t even get sent to me. It’s that extra degree of distance that I find so impersonal. (I realise you could argue I’m as logged into my account on Gmail as I would be on Facebook, but I maintain that email is much more personal than a profile on a social networking site – perhaps that is my delusion, but I think an email address has a lot of equivalence with a phone number, that a Facebook account does not).

The Internet was my social lifeline. First the PG Gamer Forums and then the wonderful, magical http://www.thetales.co.uk (still the nicest place on the Internet by far).

This Christmas was spent down at my Grandma and Aunt’s place in Kent. Me and my dad spent the whole first day thinking they didn’t even have Internet, we were almost junkies jonesing for a fix. My Aunt asked what I’d actually be doing and the first thing I said was talking to my friends.

She snobbishly replied, ‘well I just speak to my friends on the phone or see them in real life.’ My only reaction was ‘but that’s so limited!’. Of course, I do all of those things too, but I also spend so much time talking to those same people, and so many more online. I can talk to more than one person at a time, I can talk about TV shows with friends I haven’t seen since Uni while I’m watching them in my lounge without stopping the show.

Hell, my best friend and I do our podcast together every week even though we live in opposite ends of the country, and if it weren’t for the Internet, we’d have never kept up contact as much as we have.

And since leaving University, all of my current circle of real life friends have been made via the Internet in some way.

If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d be lonely and socially retarded. I’d also almost never get laid.

I disagree with you about the Facebook invite thing though, you’re taking that far too personally. I don’t even know most of my friends email address and much prefer to get a Facebook invite. I can export it to my iCal, view the details from anywhere, talk about what pub/time/whatever people will be meeting with everyone attending. Its just so much more useful than an emailed invite that’d probably be sent to my spam folder.