I have to admit having been a little unconvinced by social networking sites, they seem to only offer a poor man’s version of a web presence, photo sharing that pails besides Flickr, blogging that can’t touch WordPress et al. So my MySpace presence is only because I use MSN Messenger and it gives me a chance to create more links back to my own site – verging on anti-google-bashing. I picked up on LinkedIn purely because it provides a professional presence (something that some may suggest my domain name might not provide).
Then I signed up to Facebook, more out of curiosity, and a bit more more anti-google-bashing. But the provision of the APIs has made a world of difference. I can integrate my Flickr and LinkedIn profiles along with a dozen other best of bread solutions.
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 
The biggest problem with Facebook, aside from the lousy privacy policy, is that you can’t separate your business, and home contacts, everybody is just a friend.
An example of why that is a problem. Any of your friends can upload and tag pictures of you, at which point all of those pictures are visible to all of your contacts – your friend uploads some embarrassing picture of something, and instantly all your business contacts can see it too…
The problem is that basically Facebook wasn’t really designed with business networking in mind, but people have started using it as such.
There are other problems with some of the applications – for example I got regularly annoyed by the fact I had to manually update some of the Flickr apps whenever I uploaded a picture.
Although it may have issues with sync, Plaxo have done a much better attempt with their version 3.0. Plaxo Pulse integrates well with sites like Flickr, it has built in support for Linked In, and the biggest thing is that you can set permissions to control what your business contacts can see as opposed to your friends and family.
Coupled with that, it actually has a half decent privacy policy too.
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