De-activating my Facebook profile | Comments (6)
Posted in Software, social on 2nd June 2008, 1:49 am by Stuart
Facebook got to the point a few months back of being more annoying than useful. Friends had started to use Facebook as a way to contact me instead of using plain old-fashioned email and I was starting to find the time I spent on there never actually achieved anything worthwhile.
So I looked for a way to close my account and found the only way to do it was to de-activate my profile. A few months on and I’ve not missed it one bit. I don’t feel I’m missing anything and time can be better spent elsewhere.
This does beg the question is there going to be a tipping point where Facebook’s audience starts to find it not worth the effort or will they carry on spending lots of time there irrespective of whether it provides any meaningful value?
I’d interested to here anyone else’s opinion on the subject; am I missing something about facebook — if you love Facebook what’s so awesome about it?
I *really* want to delete my profile – I only really update staus (and even that is automated from Twitter), but the problem is that my wife is on Facebook and still spends ages on it. It’s one of the first times that she’s got into a web app/site and stuck with it and I feel like I need to keep the profile up as we have something online that we can ‘share’, if that makes sense. If she got bored of it and decided to give it a miss, I’d drop it like a hot potato.
Well my friends list is stuffed with fellow developers and designers I’ve met but I keep it ticking over for the sake of my non-techie friends to be honest – even if some of those connections “don’t offer value” as I saw someone comment someplace. I’ve reconnected with people I started school with at the age of 5, which is cool for old times sake.
I don’t spend much time on it, about the only thing I do regular is Flixster movie quizzes. It’s damned annoying getting requests from inane Facebook app X123 though, I wish people would look at my profile and ask if this (now) boring, old geek wants to send kisses or puppies or whatnot to them via some ugly clip-art app.
I disabled my account, too. Neither the wife nor connections with friends from grade school were enough to keep me in it. Every now and then I feel bad, like I’m missing out on something, but luckily the time involved to re-enable my account has deterred me from following through.
I actually missed a party last week for a friend going back to Australia, because she had invited people only through Facebook.
Since I now have a site I intend to stick with and typing my name in Google retuns it as first result, I think I’ll just put some way to contact me on my site and get rid of Facebook too.
Although I have gotten news from quite a few old friends too from Facebook, I actually haven’t had time to keep track of it all and reply to all of them. I only see a tiny value in replying to a message such as “hey! how you doing?” from someone you haven’t seen for 10 years. You either have the time to re-tell your life story 50 times or you just don’t. I’d rather have people send me a “real” email, or give me a call.
So yeah, I completely see the point in what you did and I’ll probably get rid of mine in the coming weeks too.
You said the only thing possible was to deactivate your profile. Is there really no way, even if you have to write to them, to have your info completely deleted?
Nice to see that there are other out there who feel the same as I do. I gave up facebook a year ago. I’d only had it about a year, and it was a waste of my time 90% of the time because every time I got “bored” I’d end up browsing random stuff and groups and it was useless to me. Also being in university I got sick of all the social games, and the way people turned it into a popularity contest because you could constantly see “who was with who last night”.
Also learned who my real friends were when I quit it and several people pretty much never talked to me again. I miss it occasionally, being overseas right now, and because I really liked the photo sharing, but thats about it, and its not worth all the stupid fake social interaction it creates for just trying to fit it. Sometimes I feel like people seriously treat me different for not having it. (And I’m serious, I don’t get invited to a lot of things, and the people I live with are constantly talking about things on people’s facebook, and I have no idea what they are talking about), but in the long run life has been WAY better since I dropped it.
I actually have my own website now (built from scratch too), so my friends look at my photos there and I can call my family on skype, so its all good.
I’ve been a bit concerned at the openness that could let a non friend slam you on your page. Some techie wags say catagorize your friends to limit this. But hey, live long enough and you will find the worst betrayals come from “friends and family”. ’nuff said.