Well - it was always going to step on a lot of toes, what is interesting is - the way people react, and the visibility it gives world issues: A week ago Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg told us how his website is bringing peace to the Middle East by giving young people in Lebanon a wider view of the world.

But now it's caught up in a row with Israeli settlers on the West Bank. Jewish settlers reacted angrily when the auto-complete function on Facebook finished their addresses on the West Bank as being in "Palestine".

Another group - admittedly, one with only 43 members so far - has formed on the social networking site to demand that Facebook remove any reference to Palestine because it is not a country. There are networks for both Israel and Palestine on Facebook with 400,220 and 34,419 members respectively.

It is easy to see social networks as bonding, homogenising forces, but indeed what they can be are micro-magnifying glasses on very real problems.