I know I've mentioned in the past that I'm a huge fan of Google and have been ever since I read an article about them in PC Magazine in '98. I use Blogger (obviously), Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle, and I've been playing around with Google Wave. I even have an Android-based cell phone. I don't however use Google products for everything. For instance, I prefer flickr over Picasa and Firefox over Google Chrome.

I've been on Facebook for... I can't remember how long I've been on Facebook, actually. Maybe a year, probably less. I used Friendster for awhile - until they started having major server issues and I got tired of having to wait 10 to 15 minutes for pages to load (and that was on cable!). Then I used MySpace and until I got tired of all the ads and crap. Plus, MySpace pages started taking long to load too because every one thought it was cool to put a bunch of animated gifs and crap on their pages. Then I found Facebook - not too many ads (actually, almost none when I started using it) and users couldn't customize the hell out of their pages.

But now there are more and more ads showing up on Facebook. And, since I listed my Relationship Status as "single" most of the ads I see are for online singles sites. Why do they think that showing a picture of some 20-something girl with big boobs is going to make me want to checkout their site? And, then there's what Facebook as done with your "Home" page. It used to be they displayed the status updates for your friends, along with updates when they uploaded new photos and stuff like that. Now they've changed it to News Feed/Live Feed. Sure, you can make the Status Update your default view, but that's all it displays - Status Updates. The News Feed displays Status Updates and photo updates, but everything's out of chronological order. Live Feed gives you Status and photo updates in chronological order, but it also displays updates of who your friends have become friends with.

So, you're probably wondering why I mentioned my Love of Google in the opening. That's because I'm trying out Google's orkut. "orkut is an online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating." Right now, it's mostly popular in India, a little bit of Europe, but mostly Brazil. I'm hoping that will change.