The further on in life you get, the more and more friends start to drift away, and while you try and keep good friends as close as possible, it's some times hard to manage when they move interstate or overseas. Social networking sites are great because it gives even non-technical people an easy way to create an online presence and "stay in touch" with ease. Sharing comments, photos and other media with your friends really helps with keeping in touch.

I've been having a play with facebook lately, and they really do pay attention to detail with their interface designs and notifications. Sites like myspace are flawed from a design sense, because the standard design is very average, and by allowing users to modify it, they have shot themselves in the foot. Expression is great, don't get me wrong - but a social networking site shouldn't just be a barrage of hard to read text, crappy background images and loud music as you browse around.

Facebook simply doesn't allow people to modify their layouts. It makes the whole site much easier to read and navigate, and in a strange way it actually feels more "personal" and friendly, no longer is it a competition between people to have the most "unique" looking pages, everyone is part of the same site and feels right at home. On a similar note, everything actually works, it's been coded and designed properly, and new (smart) features are being added all the time.

The "news feed" (which tells you what you friends/network has been up to lately) was claimed to be a privacy concern, but it really doesn't tell you anything special, and encourages you to join in with things you're friends are doing.

They've obviously done their research into the way humans interact - because the constantly "surprises" me with its intelligence and helpful guess work. Groups are a way to join in with other people of similar interests. For example, if I enjoy a particular type of car, or live in a particular city - I can join a group related to that. When you look to join a group, it tells you which groups you're mates are in, and even sorts by geographic location.

Another interesting thing to note, is the photo upload utility. It's written in Java, and allows you to (with your permission) select and upload files directly from your computer by viewing local folders as thumbnailed directories. This is a great solution to a problem most sites havn't even thought about solving, even if it does require Java.

All in all, I think that facebook has nailed it with how a social networking site should work. It lets you maintain a group of friends, share photos, send notes and be easy to use.