And the point of Facebook is?

OK, I'll hold my hands up. I have an "account" with Facebook. For this I get a page with details about me that I can share (favourite movies, favourite music and so on) with, er, others. I can have friends. I can send people a beer, and have an animated fish tank on my page, and take part in ditzy word games in something loosely referred to as a "network."

I won't be the first to point this out, and nor will I be the last, but Facebook is just the latest website demonstrating how the internet is still desperately trying to bring us all together. And failing. Web 2, they call it. Web 1 was all about having advertising space on a computer. Web 2 is about people talking to each other. The distinction is rapidly vanishing, as I work in the marketing industry and I know the people who did Web 1 advertising are working out how to sell their wares via Facebook, MySpace and all the other Web 2 fads currently doing the rounds. You're being sold to every second that you're online.

And what are people talking about? Facebook will either delight you or frustrate you. Take a quick look and you'll soon see a bunch of people typing things to kill time. It's literally as random as that. There may be people using it for business, or arranging meetings, or dating even, but i'll be damned if I can see it. It's just a glorified chat room. And just like it's predecessor, which has got a bad press thanks to paedophiles, it will become a cyber-dinosaur once the next Web 2 (or Web 3?) application finds its way from some computer nerd's bedroom to www-dom.

Does Facebook bring us together? No. It simply serves to remind us that once upon a time we used to meet up and play word games face-to-face, using little plastic tiles with letters on them and foldaway scoreboards, rather than sitting on our own bashing on a keyboard. Does it make our lives better? No. It's no more than a diversion, and don't we have enough of those already? Is it interesting? No. The novelty of seeing ourselves on the internet has already worn off.

Long before Facebook sells-out for commercial gain, we'll have moved on to something just as useless.