The same question people used to ask about PCs can be asked of social networks: Were our lives easier or harder, better or worse, simpler or more complex, before they came around? The answer is yes. For some folks, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem nearly as indispensable as e-mail, but creating and maintaining these virtual circles of friends turns out to be quite a bit of work, often necessarily so. Here are the ten things that bug me most about today's social networking services.

10. MySpace Kitsch

Unlike Facebook, which adheres to a relatively rigid blue-on-white, three-column design, MySpace lets you decorate your page with background images, themes, and unconventional layouts. That flexibility provides just enough rope for many MySpacers, and the results range from ugly to completely unreadable. Some MySpace pages are so poorly designed that they can crash the hardiest browser--and this alone has caused many social networkers to flee the aesthetic chaos of MySpace for the relative calm of Facebook. Thankfully, some enterprising script authors have come up with scripts that tone down the MySpace bling and clutter: One of my favorite MySpace scripts puts a button on the screen that turns custom page styles on and off with a single click.

9. The Worms Crawl In

One of the benefits of social networking is that your communications with fellow networkers bypass your normal e-mail inbox, providing a measure of safety against viruses, worms, and other malware--or so everyone thought. In 2006, however, Google's Orkut service (which is hugely popular in Brazil) was hit by the MW.Orc worm, which masquerades as an image file in a user's scrapbook and propagates to the profiles of other users, stealing personal data along the way. Despite attempts to block such infections, a new family of worms written in JavaScript attacked the service in late 2007, and the problems continue today. Of course, the issue isn't confined to Orkut; we've heard numerous stories of social networkers catching bugs from social networking sites outside Brazil too.

8. LinkedIn Is UpTight

Almost anything goes on MySpace, but not so on LinkedIn, where the strictly-business motif discourages personal expression outside of a photo (a fairly recent innovation), a status line, and standard résumé entries. Sure, the whole point of LinkedIn is to put your most professional foot forward, but really, LinkedIn, couldn't we loosen the necktie just a little? LinkedIn may never support psychedelic backdrops or party photos, but it could do a lot more to help you project something more than an utterly antiseptic persona.