Habbo is a social networking site that encourages you to meet new people by mixing gaming and chat rooms. Geared toward teens, Habbo is not like your typical social networking site. When you register with Habbo you create an avatar and are assigned your room. From there you can go into various Public rooms and chat with other people on the Internet.

While you do create a profile you can’t post photographs of yourself or blog like with most social networking sites. The profile revolves around your avatar and their friends, groups and songs.  The Habbo Hotel and various rooms act like virtual chat rooms. You can walk into a public room and just talk to whomever is there or if you already have a well established network of friends you can create a private room that allows people by invitation only.

The minimum age to join Habbo is 13. You can set your profile to be visible to everyone or invisible to everyone. We would have liked a few more customized privacy settings. However, since  your real photograph and personal information like age, or location aren’t available to other users we still felt secure with our profile open publicly to other Habbo members.

Habbo also encourages users to purchase furniture for your room, clothes for additional personalization and profile upgrades. You do this by purchasing coins, 25 coins cost about $5. To play games in Habbo you have to purchase coins, and then get game tickets.

We felt completely safe using Habbo. With just a little Internet savvy young teens could have a lot of fun using this site. It’s just a bit non-traditional and not exactly what one thinks of when looking for a social network to sign up with.

We did find Habbo needed  an additional Shockwave download in order to open rooms. Shockwave is a free program and not difficult to download. Also, we did have difficulty using Habbo in a FireFox browser but it worked fine in Internet Explorer.