To be honest I never really did get into the MySpace phenomenon, yes I did sign-up but I could never have a website replace my mobile phone as the key to my social life and my weekend plannings. Whilst there were a lot of things that made contacting people easier on MySpace, there was a lack of privacy and lets face it -- not every single person I wanted to contact was a member of the site. Editing and adding things to your very own profile page could be a little fun, but it was all a fad that I soon got over and was something I was pushed into doing by a female friend in the first place.

All these social networking sites, as they are known, have been around for quite some time now. I remember a year or possibly long ago I would get email invite from friends, usually the younger friends in the years below me (the female ones) saying to be their friends on Bebo, Facebook, the lot of them. It's something I wouldn't really have thought twice about, and there always has been that weird thing about the internet with you not really knowing who you're talking to. Many people probably think that's a new message, but I think a lot of people had that bashed into them from an early age and knew not to do anything stupid. Obviously there is the odd few that still meet people from the internet sex chat rooms, but you don't really hear about it on the news that much.

FRONT PAGE

Adding friends is easy and can be done either by looking through peoples profiles and finding people you know, or can be done via adding people who you have registered to your email address e.g. MSN Messenger contacts. They then have the choice of adding you or declining you, just as when someone adds you as a friend you have those options and a 'decide later' option. When you are signed-up in, your personal home page has a link where you can see who your pending friends are. As I have started to mention there, your logged in home page is very different to that of the front page. It includes features like seeing all the latest changes and updates on your friends profiles, as well as a map where you can see where in the world people have been visiting your profile from. Interesting stuff.

If messaging people and customising the messages you send with smileys and bold writing is something you'd rather just do on a private messaging service, then at least on Bebo you have the ability to share your pictures in separate albums. It's very easy to update photos and you can do five at a time, and it's good fun when you get picture comments. You also have a 'Flashbox' where you can put YouTube videos or upload videos of your own or just put some of Bebo's videos on your page. The only annoying thing is when you put YT videos on there you find that they do eventually get deleted for one reason or another, probably some piracy policy.