Facebook...

[DarkTrinity]

the ones who are like "Don't have anything to do tonight! TXT ME!!". Is it really that hard to entertain yourself for ONE NIGHT?

Shut your face.

Lol, I don't recall ever seeing that as your status message. But I have people on my friends list who post that like 2-3 times a week... x.x

[Scotty]

Being that I work in an office that provides social networking tools to help our customers with their work, I am somewhat biased towards my opinions of tools like Facebook.  The reason for why I use it are as follows:

• It acts as a central hub for information.  Take bands for instance.  Instead of doing numerous wiki searches to see when a band is coming out with their new album, if they are on Facebook, they're sure to post about it there.  Same applies for friends.
• It's easy to moderate information.  For instance, I have an annoying cousin who joins every single group that relates to the "Like this to see this picture.", as well as every other group he can find, and that's all I ever see for his updates.  I can easily block him (vice causing the immature "Why'd you remove me" repercussion for removing him from my friends list entirely). Same goes for those annoying Farmville games and such, I can easily block all Farmville (or any other game's) updates and never see them again.
• It's quick and easy.  I'm not much for micro-blogging, as all I get from it are partial conversations (similar to catching a text message mid conversation).  This allows you to go a bit more in-depth than micro-blogging.  I'm also not much for full-on blogging.  I just don't have the patience to sit down and write up an in-depth post about whatever is going on in my life, proof-read it for typos, grammatical errors, etc...  This is a nice medium between the two.
• The privacy has gotten a little better.  A couple of weeks ago they made a few quick functionality boosts to improve their permissions settings.  Seems like they caught enough bad press to finally get pressured into getting back to simplicity.
• They do an amazing job at inventing a web application.  This is more or less my web developer side shining through, but their application has so many moving parts, it's sickening to try and conceive how they do it, between the chat functionality, live updating, sure, it's all been done before across different applications, but for a single developer to sit there and try to think of how they did it all is hella overwhelming, even more so when the stability of the application is spot on (seemingly from the customer's standpoint at least).

And of course, there are dislikes, some are as follows:

• The people.  Without a doubt the biggest deterrent for people joining is they don't want to deal with the people (read my bullet above about one of my cousins).  I can't stand the whiny bitches that send me a request, I don't care to divulge my personal life to them, so I "ignore" their request, they apparently get a denial message, and now I get flack for not being a "friend".  Eat shit and let rot your dangly bits you overly-sensitive tainted semen samples.
• Divulging of information by association.  Sure, it's handy if you don't realize someone has a Facebook (silly assumption now-a-days, right?), and you see that they do after someone else has an update because they associated themselves to this person by posting a comment, tagging a photo, etc... But really?  There are people I don't care to have know about my personal life, mostly because they don't realize that they don't want to know about my personal life, yet so long as there is a link somewhere between them and I (i.e. a friend of the both of us), they get it all every time I associate myself to this linking factor.  Like Lingus said, privacy can be an issue, but they seem to be doing better, so long as we bitch loud enough.
• Another privacy bit that bugs me is that they would even allow for people to enter some information.  Ask Jake what I threatened him with when he left his address on his profile!  Why on earth would you even want to allow people to put their address, exact date of birth, phone number, and all this other information out there, full well knowing that if you do, YOU (as in the developer, i.e. Facebook) will catch crap (legitimate or not) the next time a girl is tailed by a 45 year old graying, ass-hair covered stalker named Wilbur, because this 13 year old didn't know better.  Sure, blame the parents, blame the stalker, blame whoever you should or shouldn't, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they shouldn't even allow people to post that.  No good can come from it.  Why not just add an extra box where you can have your Facebook password displayed in clear-text for all to see.  Or even better, post up a message saying "Do not divulge personal/geographical/sensitive information publicly, reserve such information for private messages."
• The fads.  There isn't much Facebook can do to prevent these, as people always find ways to exploit their functionality, using different parts of the application in ways it was never intended, just to do "the cool thing".  See above regarding the "Like this if you want to see the picture."  This is just a general rant that every social networking application can relate to.  Look back on the days of MySpace (deleted mine a while back, don't know if this is still "the cool thing to do") with all the surveys people would do.  Who gives a shit?  I used to make up my own just to piss others off.  Would have questions such as "If you had to piss in your grandmother's ass or Ron Jeremy's, who would you rather?"  Or "If you had to sacrifice your testicles via retardation with a phone cable, or hack off four of five fingers on both hands by steel-toe boot bludgeoning, thus making masturbation impossible, which blows your hair back more?".  This clearly demonstrates the boredom and addiction of both the trend starters as well as the trend followers, all of which need to get out from behind their monitor and try something more productive, like bringing me a cold beer!