So, having been away a week (and having used doodle and firefox ad infinitum anyway), this is the time for the social networking magnets.

Facebook I know and have an intimate love-hate relationship with.

Twitter I have been strenuously attempting to avoid - and it wouldn't let me join anyway.  Over-capacity, they say.  Hmmm, not a good sign for a global network empire.

Facebook, though... continuously slapped down in the media as an unsafe place. Unsafe for teenagers, unsafe for adults.  I can quite understand people not wanting to join and pervade their personal details all over the web, so that Facebook can lovingly sell them to advertisers you really don't want to hear from.
Hard to leave, too, I hear - you can deactivate but not delete your site once set up.
Bit of a bummer really - I'm already a member.

For me, however, it's not this that stops me making a hasty exit.
It's the fact that, and I must stress this, through no fault of my own it is deeply entrenched in my social life.
I offend people by missing parties I didn't know about coz I didn't go on Facebook.
Grr!  They are junkies and everyone else gets drawn in.

But apart from the negativity, there are some things I quite like.

I like the potential for using it for work.  The library pages I've been on are great; they present a different face of the library, almost like the equivalent of a soft-seated teaching area.  An online Learning Grid stylee.
This is good - I think taking down the barriers of formality can only help to students get involved.  It's a really accessible and relevant style.  And if it's not your style, you probably aren't on Facebook anyway, so what's the harm?
Facebook pages could do with some work, though - they have tried to overcomplicate matters by allowing different amounts of information to be added to different categories of page, and of course once it's set up you can't change the category.
Could cause lots of problems if you need to give people essential info on your library or business and there's nowhere to put it.

Twitter I find more irritating - I get distracted by short bursts of info. I don't like people texting when I'm concentrating, for example.  But I know lots of people who love it - it's just not my style.  And they wouldn't let me join, so I'm sulking.