Recently I joined Facebook. Where has it been all my social-networking life? It has everything that Bebo and MySpace has, does that better and adds a lot more. And the new applications framework makes the lack of profile “skinning” worth it.
Take The Wall for instance. This is similar to Bebo’s and MySpace’s comments section, where you post a public comment on a friends profile. People tend to use this for chats and discussions instead of the private messaging function. What does the Wall on Facebook do differently? A thing called Wall-to-Wall – it simply takes the comments you made on your friends wall and all the comments your friend made on your wall, and puts them in a nice, simple chronological list so you can see just how the conversation turned. You can also use this to see what the latest comment left by your friends friend meant.
Next, I hate the fact that Bebo and MySpace have separate blogs and don’t let me use another blogging service if I so happen to use a different one. Facebook calls these Notes, and has a Note importing tool that can take them from your Atom feed whenever you update. There is a WordPress plugin available that can take comments from these Notes and put them in their respective post in your blog.
Then there is the application system – now I can have my Del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos and YouTube videos all on the one page, meaning my friends don’t have to take timeout to click through them all (or hack at malformed URLs).
If any of my friends are reading this (there must be at least one or two of you that do), join Facebook. Especially you, Daniel (not me - you know who you are).
MySpace New Zealand is going to be 
