With more and more social networking sites, phone calls, texts, emails and blogs, it is now easier than ever to keep in touch with friends and family and unfortunately it’s also easy to rekindle relationships with people you didn’t like that much back in school, hence why you lost contact with them. When Facebook recommends them as a friend, a little excitement passes through your body, you press that add button, then when you hear that little *pop* and they say ‘Hi, long time’ you realise they were a prat in school, and not much has changed.

Social networking continues to fall under the dot com curse as its base is largely 15-50 year old internet fiends, who like myself, sometimes can’t be bothered to get up and go out to socialise but can conveniently do so from the comfort of their homes. The art of real communication is dead; instead we prefer to correspond through cyber space. Face to face witty banter is neither alive nor kicking and these social networking sites and blogs are to blame. It is easy to build up a character online, to take hours to create an interesting persona and hide behind a personality and make believe lifestyle that you have made up. It is hard however to hold someone’s attention for more than five minutes if the only thing you can talk about is how many people have poked you or what Rachel/Sandra/Jessica is wearing in her profile pic. Yes – for some of us, shamefully including myself, Facebook has taken over not only the virtual world but reality too.

With ever changing websites, it’s hard to imagine that this time four years ago the majority of us where very much into the Myspace world, where we could easily have famous celebs as our “friends” and communicate with the likes of Michael Jackson!! (Yeah right!) Myspace is now sadly a distant memory and Twitter has recently come onto the social networking scene. Many people temporarily ditched Facebook for this new craze and then once they realised that it was in fact a crap version of Facebook they quickly reactivated their accounts. Apparently Twitter gives you the power to freely write personal thoughts and feelings through a device which is known as “tweets” and allows people to comment on them and start debates? But you can simply do this on Facebook by using the “What’s on your mind?” tool. So what exactly is the difference?

Although Facebook is currently at the top of its game, ruling the social scene, I wonder if it will continue to soar through the social networking world, out doing the rest completely or become the next outcast? And if so, what genius could think of something better than our beloved Facebook?