Ok. I'm 24 years old. That means I was in high school when all these popular (especially Myspace and Facebook) social network sites appeared. Like most highschoolers my social life depended on them.
That being said, I've never looked closely at Facebook and considered why someone might choose to use it (besides the fact that EVERYBODY else does). It's worth noting that sites like Myspace allow much greater customization of one's homepage. It might even have been too customizable. The nice thing about Facebook is that you put in your information and your page comes out nice and neat.
Another appealing thing about Facebook is its fairly sophisticated privacy tools. If one knows how, it is easy to limit how much of one's profile is available to different people. That means when some old classmate from 10 years ago asks to be your friend, you don't have to worry that you're just giving away all your contact info to some guy who just wants you to join some goofy pyramid scam. Instead, you can create limited profiles and share only the info that you want to share. The problem with this (and it's a big one) is Facebook constantly updates and changes these privacy settings and learning the ins and outs of them can be both time consuming and quite tricky.
Most importantly though, Facebook is THE social network site. It doesn't matter how cryptic their privacy settings are, or how difficult it is to customize your profile. If you're under 30 it's assumed you are on Facebook, and like I said earlier, your social life may depend on it.
After thinking about it though, I do think Facebook is a good product. It could not have gotten so popular if it wasn't. People always have complaints about the privacy settings and the IM tool they have is frankly horrible. But at the end of the day Facebook dominates the social network world and I imagine it will for a long time to come.
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