Facebook and My Space

I heard recently that the Facebook community, by population, is the third largest 'country' in the world and I am a citizen. I created a Facebook page a while ago because I was interested to see how it worked.  I didn't put much in my profile, just schooling/university and miraculously, Facebook found me some 'friends".  The "friends" fell into two groups - people I had not seen nor heard from in 20 years or people I have never met.  Never mind, it was an interesting exercise.  I can see the allure of social networking for younger people.  The story on one of the sites about a student travelling to Budapest and using social networking as a research and contact tool is a very positive way of using sites such as Facebook or My Space.  Such sites do require users to have a degree of information literacy and understand that just because it is written, it is not necessarily true - the creation of false profiles undermines the trustworthiness of social networking tools.  In addition, users of social media need to be able to distinguish between the value of 'real' friends and 'cyber' friends.  If the perspective can be maintained and users are cautious, I believe social networking is a valuable and useful tool in todays increasingly 'cyber-connected' society. Although, I notice many businesses have Facebook and Twitter accounts, in addition to a website, and I often wonder why anyone would be going there, maybe I should have look and find out.