Social Networking 101

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So, what is your favorite social networking site? God knows there are enough of them, and their users will passionately tell you their favorite is the "next big thing!"

For me it all began with MySpace a while back. There are still a number of things about MySpace that confuse and/or annoy me.

For starters, it seems like 8 out of every ten friend requests I get comes from a fictional woman that wants me to click on another site to see her naked. I mark them all as spam and move on my merry way, but it's getting to the point that I tune out emails from MySpace. This is bad when I get messages from those I actually care to hear from.

I'm also lost when it comes to "pimping my page." I've got some background stuff up there, but I'd like to do my own thing. (Maybe the lovely ToastedRav masthead above, for example.) I've tried to figure out how to do this, but it's a pain in the backside to find an easy answer and is quickly proving to be more trouble than it's worth. Same goes for posting blogs. I'd like my blogs here to pop up there. There's probably an easy way to do this, but no one at MySpace wants to make it easy to figure out.

I expressed these frustrations to a co-worker one day, and he quickly began singing the praises of Facebook. I've found Facebook to be easier to manage. I sign up for the little gizmos I want and I ignore the others. I have managed to reconnect with a number of friends and acquaintances thanks to the site. The number of applications are starting to get a little overwhelming here, however. It seems like I have to spend a lot of time sifting through my own stuff to find anything I want to read.

Twitter is currently my favorite. I didn't realize how much I've come to like it until the site went down late this morning. I found myself getting the shakes over a lack of information flowing in about people I don't know. Very bizarre. I also like the fact I can get headlines from news sources on Twitter. It's a handy way of saving time when I don't get a chance to fully indulge in the morning papers.

I know I'm leaving out countless sites. Which ones do you prefer and why? Am I mis-using the sites I'm on. Would my frustrations be easily allayed? Let me know in comments!