All in all it has been a bad week for social networking. It started on Monday with the leader of the Roman Catholics in the UK, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, saying that social networking sites undermined community life and would lead to teen suicides.

His concern was that teens were treating friendships as a commodity to be traded – the fact that more people might follow someone you know on Twitter than follow you might be seen as a reason for suicide. One might have thought with the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to sex, they might prefer social networking liaisons to real ones – but we better not go there.

In the middle of the week, we had the story that ITV is to sell Friends Reunited to the Beano for £25 million pounds – a loss of £150 million in four years.

I don’t suppose we should be surprised by this. After all, ITV has a large number of problems which are not related to social networking and it does need to concentrate on its core market. Friends Reunited was never really a social networking site in the way that other sites were.

I will admit I did register on it myself but was disappointed that few of my school colleagues were there. One of them did contact me but he did not seem to have changed from school. Maybe that was Friends Reunited’s problem – you stay in contact with people from school for a reason and those you lose contact with, you do so for a reason.

And now today, Twitter and Facebook have apparently been taken down by the Russians. Personally I don’t believe it. I think there are two much more plausible theories.

Firstly I think it was the Iranians trying to take down the sites after their involvement in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections. Don’t forget, it happened the day after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president.

Secondly it has been raining and all those potentially suicidal teens could not go out and were adding to their Facebook and Twitter pages. After all, the summer weather has been dreadful and all those teens sitting at home must have overwhelmed the social networking services.