Comments on: De-activating my Facebook profile

By: Cyril Doussin

Cyril Doussin — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:30:07 +0000

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?

By: Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:20:29 +0000

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.

By: Karl

Karl — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:47:32 +0000

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.

By: Ian lloyd

Ian lloyd — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:46:05 +0000

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.