I've never been such a fan. Aside for allowing me to quickly and efficiently send out a weekly mail to my fellow football players, and allowing me to track them down by simply knowing their name rather than email address, there seemed to be no other real purpose.

I had toyed with the idea deleting my account altogether, and would have, were it not for the fact that my social life would disintegrate as quickly as it takes to click 'create an event' and 'invite all except Stephen because he's dead, or deleted'. And, of course, having to explain to real-life friends that removing the virtual proof of our friendship is by no means any sort of slight on them would just be too much to have to go through. Over one hundred and fifty times.

So we ticked along together, That Other Social Networking Site and I, without really seeing the point of each other. After all, I have neither a mafia mob nor farm, am not a huge photo uploader or quiz-taker. I'm a lurker, a status-reader, occasional liker and infrequent commenter. I resent having to block some irrelevant people, simply because I don't want to have to delete them, but I also don't want them knowing about my life.

Well, after last night, all these complaints have been forgiven, That Other Social Networking Site. Because last night I was on my way home on the tram when I realised I was sitting across from a guy I worked with for a week over two years ago. A nice guy, no doubt, we got on very well, but never enough to become actual real friends. That Other Social Networking Site friends, luckily, has a much lower standard of friendship than real life.

So, after we covered the usual, 'so what are you doing now?', 'oh, much the same, what about you', 'yeah, pretty much the same too', we didn't have that awful, awful silence. Not the one where you just can't be arsed with the person. No, its kindly but inept little brother, the one where you are genuinely happy to see the person, but have just been out of touch for so long that you simply can't think of a single interesting or coherent thing to say. You blibber for a while, before resorting to the conversational death sentence that forces one or other of the mortified participants to get off at a stop much, much earlier than intended and walk home in the freezing cold, simply to avoid having to talk about THE WEATHER.

But, That Other Social Networking Site to the rescue! Over the last two years, it has allowed me to see my tram buddy's interesting photos from a variety of trips to Africa, Asia and South America and allowed me to know, from his status updates, that he is a fellow Europhile with a freakish knowledge of world geography, and even that a mutual friend has invited us both to a thanksgiving gathering at the end of the month.

Take that, awkward silence! Hurrah for That Other Social Networking Site!