I was all set to write a blog post this morning… and then, in the course of my catching up with the Internet, noticed that Mike Skuse had pretty much done it for me. Actually, I’ve written about something similar before too, but I’m going to add another post to the pile anyway. Last week, I took some time off work - and banned myself from my laptop as well. I set up away messages on Facebook, in my Gmail account and in my work e-mail account, letting people know that if they needed me, they could call my mobile but that I wouldn’t be checking any online messages at all. Then I powered down my laptop, closed the lid, and left it alone.

I did consider locking it in the back of my wardrobe or something, just to put the temptation well and truly away, but didn’t bother in the end. Which is probably why I ended up cheating a couple of times.

Monday felt really odd. Usually, getting up and eating breakfast sitting at my desk is part of my morning routine, but Internet access was banned, so instead of switching on the computer I switched on the TV and watched the news. I had planned to walk into town or do some exploring (shamefully, since I moved house in March I really haven’t explored enough of the local countryside) but the weather had other ideas, so I spent most of Monday curled up on my sofa reading a book with obnoxious pop music playing in the background and rain battering against the windows. Which isn’t all that far away from my idea of the perfect day, actually.

By Tuesday, I’d more or less acquired the knack of not sitting at a computer all day, and since the sun was shining I went out and explored. Wednesday was another rainy day, but I was better prepared this time and spent the day baking cupcakes, and on Thursday… well, I did some backsliding. My boyfriend called from Euston to say that all the trains were cancelled, and I wanted to find an alternate way for him to get home, which naturally meant hopping onto Google. I’m not proud - but how on Earth did people cope before there was Google, anyway?

While I was online, I took the opportunity to clear the 500-odd post backlog on my RSS reader, and to read/delete the 50 e-mails sitting in my inbox. I spent about an hour on the computer before forcibly prying myself away and moving into the kitchen to cook, and then settling down with a book again.

Friday and the weekend were mostly taken up with social engagements, but I did let myself back on the computer to reply to e-mails and to clear my RSS feed again (er, and to look up a recipe. Oops). I didn’t check my work e-mail addresses, though, so this morning has involved yet more ploughing through - it’s odd, because I generally deal with e-mail as and when I recieve it, to see a week’s worth of mail all piled up like that. I use the Internet for absolutely bloody everything, from planning travel arrangements to keeping in touch with friends to planning shopping trips and finding recipes and playing games and generally keeping myself entertained and up to date with the world, and I’m not entirely sure that I even accomplished much in my week away from the ‘net, apart from lots and lots of cooking and ploughing through three novels, but somehow, it felt good to cut the strings for a little while, to liberate myself from the constantly-in-touch world and just … relax.

Still, it’s 11:24 right now and time for a nice big coffee, I think. Lots to do, lots to do…

So, Facebook has added a chat function to its social networking site. It’s currently being rolled out across the site’s thousands of users, but will eventually be available to everyone, displaying in a bar at the bottom of the page and allowing users to talk to their friends in real time, rather than via messages or wall posts.

MySpace has had a similar service for donkey’s, and Gmail’s chat function will let your AOL or Gmail contacts talk to you in real time, too. (And anyone you e-mail at a Gmail address automatically gets added to your contact list, aggravatingly, so if you don’t want someone to know you’re online and be able to contact you, you’ll have to take ‘em back off.)

While I’m not being forced to use Facebook Chat, obviously, and I can choose to be signed out/invisible on all of these services, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s possible that I’m mildly OCD - I really hate having multiple programs hanging around that essentially serve the same purpose, and I already use MSN Messenger. I guess I just don’t see the point, and am frustrated with having to always turn things off, instead of on. Facebook is enough of a pestering-machine as it is, what with the constant stream of application invitations and the “poke” function; adding a chat function is overkill.

What’s the point of using a social networking site to IM, anyway? The two are different and, in my opinion anyway, should be kept separate.

The fun never ends when you’re me. Having finally moved house and almost completely unpacked, I came down with some kind of space virus - and, of course, having only just moved to my new flat, I hadn’t managed to register with a doctor yet. Luckily, my wireless connection had been set up, so I could use my Google-fu to track down the nearest doctor’s surgery to my house. (What Google Maps didn’t tell me, sadly, was that the nearest surgery was at the top of a hill. My symptoms included being tired all the time, being short of breath, and having a nasty, burning cough. A 0.65 mile walk up a hill was not what I most wanted in the world on Friday morning, I have to say!)

Skipping over various amounts of hilarious slapstick comedy involving bureaucracy and my inability to memorise maps correctly: I finally got registered with a doctor yesterday. And was diagnosed with laryngitis. Since there aren’t any drugs for this, I’ve basically got to inhale steam with a towel over my head, drink lots of water, rest, and … not talk.

That last part is killing me. See, I can talk - my voice is all crackly and occasionally drops three octaves or comes out in an unexpected whisper, but I can move my lips and tongue and make sound come out more or less normally, and more or less intelligibly. But I’m not supposed to. The alternatives I’ve tried so far involve the following:

- Sending messages on Facebook
- Sending e-mails (occasionally to my boyfriend, while he’s in the room)
- Writing on bits of paper
- Inventing my own sign language

However! I’ve just discovered this, a demo version of IBM’s Websphere Voice text-to-speech software. I can type almost as fast as I can speak, so, assuming I don’t want to move from my desk chair for the next couple of days, this might be the winner.

Or I’ll probably just give up and talk, because I clearly can’t be trusted with anything like my own health. Pfft.

(On the bright side, my new doctor has an online way to book appointments and request repeat prescriptions. Why don’t all doctors have this? That’s brilliant!)

So, according to Nielson Netratings, Facebook’s domination of the Internet might be on the slide. Between December 2007 and January 2008, there was a 5% fall in visitor numbers - MySpace and Bebo have suffered similar drops in traffic. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not.

The sensible explanation here would seem to be that most websites suffer a drop in traffic over Christmas, particularly ones that people access from work. Because at Christmas, people have more interesting things to do. Another factor is almost certainly the fact that many offices have blocked access to social networking sites, so employees can’t access these sites during working hours. That’ll kill a lot of traffic to time-wasting websites. And the thing with websites like Facebook is that if you can’t access it regularly, there’s not an awful lot of point: the fun of it is watching things change, reading your friends’ status updates in real time, and writing messages on their walls about them. If you don’t check it for a few days, you’ll probably find that when you do come back, there’s not a lot to catch up on - conversations you might have had now won’t happen, because the moment’s passed. A lot of concerns have been raised recently about whether or not people should share any information online at all, due to fears of identity theft, and that, too, might have negatively affected Facebook’s traffic.

But I don’t think that MySpace, Facebook et al are going to be shutting up shop any time soon. It was probably naive to think that the all-consuming popularity of social networking was going to continue forever, because the zeitgeist almost moves on, often for no discernible reason. Dozens of social networking sites have already fallen by the wayside - who uses Friendster any more, or even, if we’re honest, MySpace? Something else will, almost inevitably, rise up to take the place of Facebook:  it might be yet another social networking site offering almost the same features as Facebook with one added, killer feature, or it might be something completely different. These things have a limited shelf life - it’s just that certain media outlets seem to have been a bit too quick to declare Facebook the best thing ever, and now seem to be panicking a bit now that it turns out that Facebook is just another website.

Truth be told, there’s just not a lot to do on Facebook. When you first sign up, there’s lots - you have to create a profile, filling in lots of information about yourself and putting up your most flattering pictures, but eventually, you run out of things to do, and end up visiting less often. Really, it’s a tool for keeping in touch with your friends - an online address book that lets you play games and look at pictures. The fact that its traffic is going into decline doesn’t mean a whole lot, except that the general Internet public is quite fickle about how and where it chooses to waste its time.

Confession time: I intended to write at least one blog entry over the Christmas holidays. But I couldn’t, because I left the e-mail containing my password in a work account, and since I was at home, er, that wasn’t particularly useful.

What I was going to write about, though, was the exciting news that Facebook has removed the word “is” from its status update box. (Which is now hopelessly out of date, but I’ll plough on regardless.) For the whole two people remaining in the world who don’t use Facebook, I should explain: Facebook allows you to enter a sentence about what you’re doing, thinking or feeling at any gi ven time, so all your friends can read it - kind of like Twitter, on a slightly smaller scale. And until very recently, that update box provided you with the beginning of a sentence - [Your name] is…

Now, though, the ‘is’ has been made optional, rather than compulsory. Now, your status update can incorporate whatever verb you like, without you having to come up with some grammatically torturous way of doing so. I can make my status read “Sarah Dobbs likes Christmas”, rather than, er, “Sarah Dobbs is liking Christmas”, or whatever nonsense I might have come up with, were I feeling particularly incapable of sentencing properly.*

If you’re a Facebook user, there were two appropriate reactions, upon hearing this news. One was “cool!” The other, “meh, whatever.” Bafflingly, though, some contrary types immediately set up a Facebook group demanding the return of the ‘is.’

I know Facebook groups are largely pointless and don’t serve any function other than to kill time, but - seriously? Does not compute.

* No-one reading this will get that reference. It’s obscure, but worth it.

Could it be coincidence that just when it seems Microsoft is set to pay out lots and lots of money for shares in Facebook, a massive backlash starts against the site for its failure to protect children?

See, apparently, some sting operations were set up where adults posed as children on Facebook and found that they were being sexually propositioned by other adults. This, apparently, is Facebook’s fault. Does anyone else have deja vu? Isn’t this exactly what happened with MySpace?

The difference, though, is that Facebook is a hell of a lot easier to lock down than MySpace was. It’s easy to set it up so that various people can only see specific parts of the information that you’ve chosen to share with the world in the first place, so you can tell your friends everything and strangers nothing at all. I’ve never even received a message from someone I didn’t know on Facebook.

So I’m interested to know what the profiles that received these inappropriate propositions looked like. And also to know what, exactly, the hysterical side of the media thinks Facebook should do about it. Because from where I’m standing, the site has already done plenty to keep its users safe and sound.

So, Sophos has revealed that people give out way too much personal data on Facebook - it set up a sting operation in the form of a fake profile for a plastic frog, and set out to make as many friends as possible. And of the invites the frog sent out, nearly 90% buddied up with the amphibian.

How long is it going to take before people realise that putting personal information on the Internet might be dangerous? Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. For some reason, people seem to feel like Facebook is safer than MySpace and that they can give out more information (up to and including their real work and home addresses, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers) and nothing bad will come of it.

Let’s be clear here. If you fill out your profile fully, with all your real information, you had better be pretty damned sure that you really know everyone on your friends list, and that the information is restricted to only people you’ve accepted as friends. Otherwise, you will find yourself a victim of identity theft at some point. It’s crazy to think otherwise.

And a plastic frog..? Come on, people.

By this stage, everyone in the known universe has already blogged about the etiquette of social networking, to the point where I feel almost too bored by the subject to write about it. Usually, you see, when it comes to questions of MySpace or Facebook manners, I have a ready answer.

“Someone wants to add me but I don’t know them, how do I politely decline their offer of friendship?” Press the Deny button - you don’t know them, you don’t have to be friends with everyone, don’t feel bad.

“My friend’s ex wants to friend me on Facebook, but I think my friend would be upset, what should I do?” Decline. Who needs the stress, for the sake of increasing your friend count by one?

“I’ve got loads of people on my friends list that I don’t really know and don’t want them to know what I’m doing any more…” Yeah, delete them, chances are they won’t even notice. Plus, the label of “friend” on MySpace and Facebook doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it does in real life - it’s much easier to break off a friendship online, because it doesn’t involve having to actually see the person or do anything other than click a button. Problem solved.

Yeah, only today I received a friend request from someone I actively dislike. The feeling’s mutual, too. So obviously I’m not going to click the ‘add friend’ button; I don’t want to be friends! But for some reason I don’t even feel like I want to click the ‘deny’ button, either, because I just want to ignore it and hope it’ll go away. But it won’t. The status update is there every time I log in, big and glaring and demanding I take action.

This is stupid. Denied.

Gulp.