# 13 MySpace and # 14 Facebook

Well after much deliberation and psyching up I finally joined MySpace and Facebook, checked out what each of them offered. Checked out what other people had on their sites, then promptly deleted my accounts. I know that was wimpy of me but there is a reason I have avoided joining the ever growing numbers of people on social networking sites. Over the past few years I have been amazed by the number (and frankly the type of people who have wanted to 'friend' me). Surprise! Surprise! my friends have remained my friends even though I have not friended them on Facebook or MySpace

I have to say that I printed out the 5 easy steps to stay safe on Facebook, and followed them to the letter. I can see how people would get frustrated with this task and not bother, though when I looked at the default settings it certainly allows people to access just about anything. For this reason, I would prefer facebook over MySpace as it seemed to offer better privacy settings for the user. MySpace had a more appealing  homepage and I can certainly see it appealing more to the younger user with it's easy access to music downloads. Thanks for the articles about protecting yourself, they were very valuable.

Lots of my friends are on Facebook and find it very useful for sharing photos, especially when living/travelling overseas or organising group catch-ups. I don't feel the need at the moment to spend an inordinate amount of time seeing what others are doing. Maybe that need will present itself as my kids get older.

I checked out Ning but couldn't access it and had a look at Linked-in which looked good for those in professions such as teaching or education. Haven't had much time to investigate Twitter. What I saw didn't impress me much. However, I have enjoyed reading many people's "Twittered" comments whilst watching Q and A.

# 12 Flickr

Yipeeee! It worked!!!!

Imagine my surprise when I set up my flickr account and found not only did I already have an account (which I suspect a family member had set up) but that there were photos of my children on it that my brother-in-law had put on. I have uploaded photos to flickr and discovered that because I set my settings as 'family only' and not 'everyone', I was unable to post the pictures to my blog. At least I know how to do it if the need arises. I like how you can search for people by email or name. It's easy to organise into sets and collections of sets. the galleries are great for getting ideas. I loved the N-generation clip.

I got this from Dumpr. Love the way you can turn photos into sketches. I tried it on photos which I loved but didn't want to put photos on my blog. Here goes, let's see how easy this is to add to my blog.


http://www.dumpr.net/photo/e1c236ca0a5765e8/

oops will try again.