Occasional Observations

Obviously billg is more hip than me, as he beat me by several days in deleting his Facebook profile, but we're in the same club as mine's gone. I just got so sick of banality - like being notified that I've been bitten by a vampire or that someone's bought me a virtual Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster.

A couple of weeks away from the site made me realize that I wasn't missing it any more.

What a fickle lot we are. When I first signed up for Facebook, way back in the annals of history (it was almost a full year ago, I'm sure), it was just The Best Website in the World. I visited every day and carefully added only friends - not business friends / associates / clients / colleagues. It was my social networking site for letting my hair down. That is, until my business contacts piled in. Feeling that I could not easily refuse them (sorry! you got the wrong me!) I also changed my profile to make it a bit more corporate ... and a bit less fun.

That was the start of the slippery slope. But it was the endless banal applications that tipped me over - skiiers vs snowboarders, vampires vs werewolves, etc. And having found most of my Facebook-using contacts the thrill of discovery has gone. I really still like the status updates but Twitter does it better. But that's about the only thing I still valued on Facebook. And having reached that point, it was time to go.

Of course I had a few last-second qualms about deleting my profile - what would I be missing out on? Well, nothing I can't get elsewhere on Flickr, Twitter, from email, IM and actually meeting and talking to people.

So I've gone. My account is deactivated. I'm an ex-Facebooker. I've disappeared. The account deactivation process offers cowards an easy way back - just log-in again as usual and receive an email on how to reactivate. Let's see if I'm missing anything...

PS I take back that comment about Twitter - I've deleted my account there, too.

Labels: social networking