Jayne Dowle: I've finally fallen for Facebook and its world of friends at my fingertips

Dave has been a Facebook devotee for a couple of years. He works all over the world as a sound engineer, so his friends and colleagues are far-flung. For him, it is not only a friendship thing, but vital for work. And now, whether he is in Coventry or Copenhagen, Facebook is a brilliant way to see what we are up to back home.

I had long insisted that with two kids, several jobs, no spare time and several bad habits I could already do without, the last thing I needed was another addiction.

I would also pontificate about the amount of time my students spent messing about on Facebook when they should be working. I'd even threatened to pull out the plug in the classroom. But then, teaching public relations, I began to realise that if I didn't get with it, I would be left behind.

Facebook is the first place young people go to find out about new

music, gossip and social trends. If I'm in the business of

communication, and I can't talk the talk, I might as well give up and retire.

So, I decided to take the plunge. And now I speak of Facebook with all the zeal of a new convert. I have 127 Facebook friends, a modest amount by some standards. John Prescott, apparently, has 2,501. Through these friends, I have picked up several freelance jobs, caught up with old colleagues, debated the General Election with people I last had deep

and meaningful conversations with at university, and discovered an instant way to share news and photos. Talk about time-wasting. It saves me time, and it's quicker than texting.

Get past the intensely-irritating Farmville updates – for the uninitiated, it's a game which involves creating an imaginary farm, and I certainly don't have time for that – and Facebook really is what it says it is; "a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them".

I love it when I look at my "friends list". It's like a snapshot of my 42 years, every one of them with a story to tell. Here is the lad I played with when I was four, now drilling for oil in Brazil, there is my feisty sixtysomething friend, still fuming over the Labour defeat, and here is the girl I worked with on a newspaper a decade ago. Once we ran our lives to daily news conferences, now we're timing them to make the school run. Just being able to say "hello" and know that they are all out there makes me smile.

Our brief exchanges can be more revealing than any number of long conversations. It's the immediacy, that instant rapport which tells us whether we connect with a person or not. And if you find you don't really have anything to say to each other, you can always ignore them.

I had always suspected that people who love Facebook created a virtual world because their real one was too mundane to bear. Much like Farmville, they edited out the nasty bits, chose only the photographs that made them look good, and were rather vague about their marital status.

I'm finding the opposite is true. With women, at least, no illness is too embarrassing to recount. No weight loss too minimal to ignore. No domestic trauma goes unrecorded. It might seem like inane chit-chat, but it cements bonds, and proves the importance of human communication in a world where all of us rush around with no time to talk. In the past, we might have caught up over a cup of tea or a protracted phone call. Now, we're sat there at midnight, chores done at last, sharing our news with people who empathise with us.

Convert I may be, but I do still have one major reservation about Facebook. The minimum sign-up age is supposed to be 13. However, lots of much younger kids – like my son's friends, no older than eight – seem to have found a way around it, with the blessing of their parents. They even turn up at my kitchen table asking if they can borrow my laptop to check their status. Unless you can police your children's computer activity 24/7, this is tempting all kinds of trouble.

Late at night, as I "chat" to my teenage nephew in Kent, I realise just how easy it is for paedophiles to approach youngsters in this secret world when everyone else is in bed.

We've all heard about 14-year-old girls adding three years to their age and posting pictures of themselves. And the boys bullied by gangs, reducing to wrecks by cruel taunts posted to their "Wall". Knowledge is power.

Facebook may well empower us all, take us places we never dreamed of going, and bring back into our lives people we had forgotten about. But knowing when to pull the plug is the most powerful thing any of us, especially parents, can do.