Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook intrigue me for a number of reasons. I use both for different reasons.

Facebook has given me the chance to connect to people I haven't seen or heard from in years and it gives me the chance to keep in touch with them without the pressure of having to call them or visit them. Simply, I can keep in touch with friends who I am not necessarily that close to but don't want to lose touch with.

My Twitter site is less so. The only people from my Facebook site who appear on my Twitter site are people I met through citizen journalism. The reason behind that is that I use Twitter mostly for sourcing and promoting my citizen journalism work.

I use Twitter to keep an eye on breaking news and for keeping up with articles posted on other websites that I might want to write about myself. Once I've written my article I 'Tweet' it as a way of free promotion and hopefully that brings people to the website I've placed my article on and they will earn my article views which in turn means that I earn money. I don't visit Twitter every day and I don't see the need to.

Facebook, on the other hand, I visit every day and often. I find messages from friends who I see out with Facebook and some messages from people I don't. I'm not addicted to Facebook although it might seem so. I believe that addiction to Facebook is something more serious than visiting it a few times during the day. The addiction to Facebook is when you literally can't click away from it. When you write something and hang about for hours to see if anyone writes anything back.

The most serious side of Facebook addiction is when it becomes more important that anything else in your life. When you find it becomes more important than you career or your family that's when you're in trouble.

People think it's OK, it would be worse if they were addicted to drugs or alcohol but Facebook addiction is just the same. Any addiction is serious if it takes you away from everything else. Google and find out how many people lose their jobs because of their Facebook addiction. There have been a few reported cases of relationships breaking down too.

While social networking sites are good things they also have a negative side. I knew of one girl who disappeared from my friends list so I enquired why. It turns out she had slept with someone else's boyfriend (not a particularly smart move) and had then began finding threats written on her site. The threats didn't stop when she threatened to contact the police, they simply got worse. She eventually contacted the social networking site involved and closed her account.

I pondered over it for a while. She had told me the names of the people who had written the nasty comments and threats on her site and it made me wonder. How many of those people would have said the words to her face? Not many I'm sure. Sitting at a computer makes us incredibly brave at times.

I'm also wondering why people add others to their list of friends only to remove them a while later. One girl told me via email she'd removed me because I never left her messages. It works both ways, she had never left me any either. I didn't respond to the email because I find it slightly childish to start deleting people because they don't contact you. I wasn't aware that we had to contact everyone in our lists every so often of they'd feel offended.

Let's be honest. If you have a Facebook account take a look at your friends list, how many people there do you regularly contact? I don't mean the people you are currently friends with outside of the site, I mean those who you only got in touch with since opening your Facebook account. There probably isn't many people on that list that you regularly contact.

So is this a new pressure created by social networking sites? Don't add people in case you never feel the inclination to write them a message. They might feel offended.

There are people on my Facebook friends list who I only contact when we're discussing our old school. The one we attended has been re-built on another site and there is an event at the old school this month. It's been so much easier using Facebook to get in touch with everyone rather than trying to contact other people to get them to contact other people and so on.

As with everything, social networking sites will have their good and bad points.

It's dealing with the bad points that's tricky.