When my daughter was twelve she started using MySpace, one of the most popular of the social network sites that have attracted millions of teenage users around the world.

Like other MySpace users she created her own profile, with information about her interests and activities, photos, music and even some videos.

She now has over a hundred friends, most of them schoolmates, and gets lots of comments on her home page.

At the moment the conversation is all about exams, but there is a lot of party planning, general moaning about life - and parents - and random chat about TV, music and even the weather.

I know all this because her profile is public, so any other MySpace user can see it.

Most of her friends have public profiles too, even though the site lets you make your page viewable only by people you have added to your friends list.

I can read what is being said, but I can't add my own comments to her page because my daughter refuses to add me as a friend.

She thinks it would be too embarrassing to have her dad - old, grey and boring - on MySpace, and her friends would laugh at her.

One way to help your kids learn how to use the internet safely is to be there with them, and being part of their online friendship networks is as useful as knowing who they are hanging out with at school.

But since I can see what she's doing on MySpace I haven't pushed this, though if she was a bit younger or less cyber-savvy then it might be an issue.

And it looks like things are going to change soon.

She's just joined Facebook, another social site that is used more by sixth formers and people at university, and this time she says she will be my friend.

I just hope that she doesn't think my friends are boring, or tell them too much about what I'm like as a father!

When my friend Paddy wants to find a website she goes to the Google search engine and types in the address she is looking for, like 'www.bbc.co.uk'.

The site she wants for is always the top hit, of course, so she can then click on the link in the search results and get there.

The first time I saw her do this I was speechless, because it is seems like such an inefficient way of doing things.

If you want to go to a website then all you need to do is to type its address - the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL - into the box at the top of the browser window.

That's how Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and every other browser works.

Instead of typing that same URL into the Google search box, Paddy could just type it into the address bar, saving time and a few clicks of her mouse every time.

It still seems like a roundabout way of getting to the website you want, but I can see a couple of advantages to doing it this way.

First, it means that you do the same thing every time you want to find a website.

Instead of having to remember to type URLs into the address bar and other searches - like 'BBC news' into the search box, you type everything in the same place.

And second, if you make a small mistake in your typing, like putting 'www,bbc.co.uk' with a comma, it will still work.

This isn't enough to persuade me to start doing it, but I'm a much more experienced computer user than Paddy and I use my computer a lot more each day.

She has found a way that works for her, and just being a little bit less efficient doesn't really seem to matter.

We all develop our own strange habits in all areas of life, and computers are now just part of most people's daily routine.

And as long as it doesn't give the wrong result, I can't see why we should all have to do the same thing.