Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. ~ Facebook

Facebook is similar to online social communities like MySpace and Bebo, but differs in ways like website design, applications and mainly maturity of users.

Facebook from first glance has a great website design, that is clean, efficient and very effective at providing information to both the account holders and the profile viewers. One great feature I found about Facebook compared to MySpace is the security options. All information about yourself and all information on your profile page has a security option associated with it, allowing you to set security permissions on them so that they may be viewed by certain types of people (i.e. friends, people in your network, no one).

Another great thing about the website design is how easy all page elements on the profile page can be changed by dragging and dropping the page elements. This feature is very similar to the iGoogle homepage and Live.com homepage.

Facebook has what they call applications. These are very similar to widgets or gadgets for your Facebook profile page. Because applications are created by the community and professional developers, there is a huge abundance of them. I have personally installed an XFire widget and a del.icio.us widget on my profile page. These widgets allow you to customize the page with extra content from dozens of categories including business, education, music, photo and more.

Facebook looks very interesting and although other websites like MySpace and Bebo have a larger user base, I believe Facebook has earned the loyalty of many users thanks to its simple and yet effective design, loads of features including applications and the above average security options.

You can find my profile on Facebook here. Although please note, Facebook does not allow unregistered users to view profiles. You may view a public listing of my profile here, but this is a summarized version of my profile with hardly anything there.

Thanks,

Marat