It's great to keep in touch with your friends and colleagues, but does the price have to be spam, zombie bites and friend invitations from people you've never heard of?

The same question people used to ask about PCs can be asked of social networks: Were our lives easier or harder, better or worse, simpler or more complex, before they came around? The answer is yes.

For some folks, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem nearly as indispensable as e-mail, but creating and maintaining these virtual circles of friends turns out to be quite a bit of work, often necessarily so.

Here are the 10 things that bug me most about today's social networking services.