Facebox, a MySpace alternative

Last weekend, I recieved another invite to a social networking service in my Hotmail inbox, which I usually regard as spam. I hadn’t seen an invite to this service come through my inbox before so I thought I’d check it out. I’m glad that I did, because Facebox seems to be a really good alternative to MySpace.
The first thing I noticed upon going to the Facebox homepage is that there are barely any ads which is something that is carried all the way through the site. So far, all I’ve been able to find is one block of Google ads on the Facebox homepage, compared to the multiple flashing and annoying ads that you get pushed at you on most pages within MySpace.
Profile pages on Facebox are quite appealing over the, usually, poorly designed MySpace pages. This is due to the user having the choice of a variety of pre-designed (and good looking) themes for their own pages, however the page layout is pretty standard at this stage. They don’t allow HTML tags, so you can’t make any modifications to the layout through hacking up their code, but that might change. I think one of the big appeals of MySpace is the way a user can customise their page to their hearts content (wether it actually looks good or not) and maybe Facebox will loose out on that factor.
In the feature set there’s the standard Photo/Video upload that you can find on most social networking sites these days. There’s also the ability to check out some basic stats on who’s been visiting your profile which is pretty handy. The messaging between users is also pretty good and they seem to have taken a page out of Google’s book in the way that they arrange the messages.

The best part of all, is that the service doesn’t break every 5 minutes! I’m sick of getting errors that have ‘Been forwarded to our technical department’ on MySpace. Unfortunately, the searching feature on Facebox needs a strong overhall because when I search for people from within a certain age range, I’ll often get people 2 years younger than the minimum age I searched for mixed in with the results I actually wanted.
I strongly recommend that people check out and register on Facebox if you’re addicted to MySpace, or just want to sign up to a MySpace like service without all the ads and other junk that you see there. There’s no band pages on Facebox, but that’s a small price to pay for a much cleaner looking, more stable service.
You can checkout my Facebox profile at: http://en.facebox.com/jameskirsop and if you register use my referal link so I get some Facebox credits.

-james