My friends all seem to be joining facebook, but I don't want to. I think I may be being overly paranoid, but it feels sinister somehow. I know, you're calling the men in the white coats now because I'm seeing conspiracy's everywhere. What bothers me is that it asked for my email address and password so it could search my address book to see if my friends are on there already. Now, this could simply be them being terribly nice and saving me the inconvenience of having to type in my friends' addresses, but it seems rather odd to me. Surely one of the first rules of internet safety is never give anyone your passwords, why should I trust facebook with my passwords? They don't even give a search box so that you can just put in your friend's email address (presumably that's only available after you register). The wording of their privacy policy is a little scary too, they can and will gather info from you from anywhere they like and can give/sell your info to any companies they like. Though probably all of my data has already been collected and stored by every company that could ever have any possible interest, and really is there anything that interesting to know? How often do I actually read the privacy thing, it's only because I was checking about the email address and password to see if they mention it (I didn't find any mention of how safe it is, but I didn't really look all that hard) so it could be that everything I've put on blogger for example is being sold, then again, I don't put my real address or phone number on here.

I also don't like the fact that they won't let you see anything without joining either, even the page for the friend who's invited you, though I guess that's true of many sites.

I'm pretty sure I'm being overparanoid, but until my paranoia drops a bit I won't be joining, though the peer pressure may get to me eventually, particularly if I start not knowing what's going on if people start announcing them all through Facebook.

I may even just be being prejudiced and stubborn, 'cos in my mind previously I'd lumped Facebook and Myspace together as evil sites for showing who has the most friends.

Nothing will ever be as good as 6degrees was :-( I'm not really sure why that was different, probably because it was back in the good old days when "cool" people didn't know how to use computers, so they didn't come and take things over.