by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: July 26, 2010

Facebook is an internet phenomenon that exploded in 2006 and, four years and an estimated 500,000,000 members later, shows no sign of slowing down. The world's first truly comprehensive social networking site, the average Facebook member can virtually organise all aspects of their social life by contacting their friends and family members through the site, and you can be reunited with long lost friends as well.

The impact of Facebook has been tremendous, but it is not all positive. There are problems as well as benefits associated with this powerful communication and social networking tool, and below are some of the best and worst aspects of using Facebook.

Scrabbulous. A few years ago, you could play an online version of the popular board game Scrabble against your friends and random Facebook members. Scrabbulous was truly brilliant - an online version of a board game which was actually more fun than playing the original board game, because you could take hours and days between moves rather than having to spend your whole afternoon locked in the kitchen with two friends and three dictionaries. Cheating was rife, and there was a whole sub-section of the Internet devoted to helping you cheat at Scrabbulous but make it look as though you were playing fair.

Then the people who own the rights to Scrabble noticed the game's immense popularity, and had it shut down (ignoring the fact that they'd sold many thousands more copies of the original board game as a result), ruining the lunchbreaks of hundreds of thousands of Facebook members forever. There are some who left Facebook after Scrabbulous was removed, and many more who cut their usage of the site dramatically. The various insipid replacements for the game never matched its wild popularity, and the party was killed for all time.

The demise of Scrabbulous could be one of the worst aspects of using Facebook, but really this is to illustrate a wider problem with the site. Because anyone can join, submitting a bare minimum of information which may not even be true, people keep just DOING STUFF on Facebook without really thinking about whether the stuff in question is entirely legal.

Teenagers organise parties for their friends on a public social network and are surprised when 2,000 drunks turn up and trash the house. Nutjobs set up tribute pages to recently deceased mental gunmen, prompting questions in parliament. Workers post status updates about how they've just phoned in sick, and then look surprised when

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