Top 10 best and worst things about Facebook

2. Time wasting
Shaun Nichols: As The IT Crowd points out so well, Facebook can take up minutes and even hours of your day without you ever realising. Those games that are fun to pick up on the spur of the moment can turn into full blown online addictions that cut into time otherwise spent doing something productive.

Really it's nothing new. Role-play games have long been a time sink, as have arcade titles and even bundled games such as Minesweeper. What makes Facebook titles particularly dangerous, however, is that they run within the browser and on top of a platform that you would otherwise visit only for a short time.

For example, maybe you get an alert that a friend left you a message, or shared a video file. So you go and check it, but on the way out you notice that your Farmville crops need harvesting, then after that you see that one of your friends is playing Texas Hold 'Em and you'll be damned if Steve is going to get the best of you at poker again.

Before you know it your deadline is five minutes away and your boss wants to know precisely why you've yet to file that article you said you started on two hours ago. Not that we've had any sort of personal experience with that sort of thing.

Iain Thomson: As Shaun alludes to, the fact that he is able to write this feature instead of having his fingers broken some time ago is a tribute to his undoubted skills as a wordsmith and a charming and plausible nature. But he does make a valid point: Facebook is a huge temptation for timewasting.

Many companies would like to ban social networking sites like Facebook because they fear it takes productive time from their employees. On one level they are right, but on a more fundamental level this is a false economy.

Economic fundamentalists would like you to believe that any time at work not actually working is theft, but human minds don't work like that. We need rest periods to encourage inspiration.

That said, this can be taken too far, and anyone who prioritises social networking over the real world needs a serious talking to.

1. Privacy
Iain Thomson: When we were coming up with this list the easiest pick was the top worst thing about Facebook - privacy.

As a case in point I got the new HTC Evo the other month, which comes with Facebook integration. As I synced with my account I suddenly found I had a lot of mobile phone numbers in my address books.

To my mind, a mobile number is a private thing and there are people I've befriended on the site from whom I wouldn't dream of asking for such data.

Users who put that level of personal data on the site are playing with fire. Supposing one of your friends joins a cultish group like the Scientologists and decides to spread the word. You've just handed them a level of personal data that would cost a fortune in private investigation fees in olden days.

If you actually read the terms and conditions of Facebook you have very few rights over your personal data on the site, and you have to trust that Facebook management don't abuse their position and sell it on to third parties. If that practice became widespread I can see it as the one thing that takes Facebook down, as people will flee in droves.

Shaun Nichols: In my mind, most of Facebook's privacy issues are due to the growth of the site.

Facebook is in a situation where the amount of money it makes is directly related to what sort of customer data it hands over. Given the amount of money invested in the site, there is a lot of pressure on the company to turn a profit.

On top of that, you have many users who have set their privacy restrictions based on the previous versions of the site and the past policies. Suddenly information that in the past was limited to a few people is now accessible to anyone involved with a certain application.

Privacy in Facebook is a fluid concept, and thus far neither the company nor its users have made enough of an effort to keep up with those changes.