The beautiful and sainted Mrs BNS as recently joined facebook, naturally been teenage both daughters are signed up – so as somebody in their late 40s do I need to join the social networking fetish – go on convince me

It’s a moronic inferno. Next thing you’ll be doing that inane twitter thing.

if you’re at uni, yes. if you’re not, but are still ‘young’ (at heart perhaps!), go out to events, want to share photos of stuff etc, then yeah, why not… (plus you can, in theory, keep an eye on your kids 😉 )

if, however, you are properly middleaged, not bothered about keeping in touch with loads of friends in an easy way (email IS less convenient), then no. cos you’ll just get all grumpy with it.

ime facebook at uni is almost essential – i don’t think i actually know more than 1 or 2 people who are not on it. out cycling club is organised through it, i find out about events and tickets through it etc. don’t care what people say about it, at uni, it IS VERY useful.

if my dad, however, appeared on it, i would worry (and i would limit what he could see 😉 )

Yes, give it a go.

But don’t add your kids as friends, it’s a bit like reading their diary (except it’s a diary that all their friends and casual acquaintances can read anyway).

I don’t do self publicity, so no for me.

I am a miserable tw*t with no friends, facebook is completely irrelevant to my life…

The wife is on it all the bloody time though, made worse with the iPhone facebook app.

it can be useful – I went to a gig recently that turned into a sort of impromptu 20-year uni reunion; if it hadn’t been for facebook I wouldn’t have known that some old friends were going, and would have missed out big time.

sometimes it’s a waste of space too

I tried it for a while (40ish bloke). It got me in touch with a lot of old friends I haven’t seen for about 20 years so that bit worked but after a while I got sick of being asked to ‘find out what girls I like’, or ‘own someone’ so I rarely go there nowadays.

One interesting thing is that an amazing amount of indian work colleagues use it and have linked to me which gives me a good insight into their personal tastes. That has been a real eye opener. One chap who is very quiet and modest in the workplace has shown himself to be a huge fan of extremely busty manga style cartoon ladies dressed in leather.

You never can tell, eh?

If your family is spread out all over the world, it’s brilliant.

But omigod, sometimes you really don’t want to know what no3 son is up to, what he drank, and how far he projected the results…

Its not really moronic johnners – its a very handy tool for keeping in touch with mates who you no longer live near, for organising rides with said people and sharing the reslting photos etc. Sure you can get bored of the constant requests for applications and stuff but I seem to have nailed blocking all the stuff I dont want. I have joined twitter but seriously think its a total waste of time.

Just dont add people you no longer care to hear about. Adding 50 old school friends is a bad idea, they’re all morons who speak in text speak and have 9 kids at the age of 20.

It’s an application that can be used how you want. Some people seem to spend their life on their playing games and doing quizes.

But for me it is a good way to to see what contacts and aquaintances are up to. For example two people I have on their sometimes post research articles, so that for me is great. I have another “friend” who is an Amercian musician who does some amazing sound scape meditation CDs. He sometimes posts youtube interviews he has done, and that’s really interesting too.

It’s also great if you are away from home for any length of time, as rather than blog your whole life away, you can just put the occasional update.

So yeah, for me I like facebook, but I stay away from apps and only have friends on their I want to have updates from.

I personaly am very cautious of the information i put on the web these days, although i do have a facebook site it is mainly to keep in touch with friends i cant see every day and there is little or no personal information stored there, this said i ahve and do find it a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family.

Simon

Just dont add people you no longer care to hear about. Adding 50 old school friends is a bad idea, they’re all morons who speak in text speak and have 9 kids at the age of 20.

Wise advice. I get the occasional invite from people I vaguely recall not really linking 20 years ago. Not sure why I would want to share experiences with them now when I didn’t want to then!
I refuse all that stuff and people get the correct impression that I dont want to be friends with them. Simple as that.
However I have a few friends scattered around the world who I keep in touch with using Facebook.
Twitter seems a total waste of time!

As an ex-colleague of my girlfriend found out, never write anything that might contradict what you tell your boss when you have a few days off work.

And don’t post pictures of a questionable nature relating to the same events…

I like it, don’t be a grumpy old man, sign up, have a play and then decide

Add me as a friend here

only if you want to mind

you can control who sees what quite easily, i have a friends list, a family list and an others list.

and you can de-friend people as well. I did it recently and it was quite therapeutic…

If you’re not on it by now then there’s probably no point bothering, grandad.

I quite like it – we have friends dotted all over and it is a good way of keeping up to date with them without ringing all the time.

Yep, good for keeping touch but RTM before you start – not a strong male trait but can save some embarrassment later.