Honestly, no one cares what I think about this. Well, I’ll retract that by saying that my relevance or “voice” in this web 2.0 industry as diminished ever since I canned my “twitter book” and stopped going to every tech conference possible. In actuality, I came to terms with the fact that I’m not ready to be an author yet and realized that “networking” was getting in the way of personal growth but let’s talk about this whole Facebook thing.
So Facebook made some changes recently. These changes affect the privacy of users in a way that most users think is going too far. If you’re reading this blog, I assume you are up on this whole Facebook thing. If not, just google for “facebook privacy changes” and that’ll be good enough. I’m too tired to link it up right now.
That’s another thing. Why haven’t I been blogging? Dude. I’m tired! Brightkite rocks but I’ve been very busy there and haven’t had time to blog. Really! So get off me about it!
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Anyway, I’m not going to delete my Facebook account. If there’s one lesson I learned when deleting my FourSquare account in January is that, you might come back to the service or need to login to the service to do some research and realize you don’t have an account anymore and have to create one. I had to create a new FourSquare account for work purposes. So, that sucked because I had deleted mine that was a year old and had thousands of check-ins.
If you’re pissed off enough to delete your Facebook account, you’re just stupid. Facebook is one of the top 5 sites on the web. You’ve been logging into it and shaping your social graph every day since 2005 and now you’re going to delete it? That’s like being pissed off that your neighborhood street was re-paved with white cement and you decide to just burn your house down. No, you look at your options and simply rent it out or sell it because burning it down gets you NOTHING! Don’t delete your Facebook account. I was very close to deleting my Twitter account in Mid-2007 when everyone was moving over to Pownce / Jaiku. Thank god I didn’t because I’d be sharing my posts with 500 people still using Jaiku and Pownce shut down last year.
You took the time to create an account so unless the service has completely destroyed your livelihood, just lock it down and never come back. Mark all of your privacy settings as “only me”, delete your information, disable all of the connected applications, 3rd party sites and remove Facebook connect from your blog and then walk away! It’s that simple, really. You commit Facebook suicide by never coming back.
My MySpace profile still lives on right here. I log in once a year to update my profile and location then log out. One day, Myspace MIGHT come back. It might be on top again. I doubt it but it’s still a fucking huge site with tons of visitors and is still larger than Twitter. Hell, I still have a Jaiku account because it’s just stupid to delete these things. It doesn’t hurt me to have that account open so why remove it?
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So here’s the deal. If you’re so pissed off about Facebook’s new privacy debacle and takeover of the social graph, then stop logging in. When people ask where you’ve been, just say why and they’ll respond, “okay.” It’s that simple.
Honestly, if you were really concerned with privacy, really concerned with decentralization of data and really passionate as an in touch social media guru, then you would have deleted your Google Account back in 2008. If you still have a Google account, Facebook is the least of your worries.
Sorry for the short post. I’m a little busy.
You nailed it, Adam. That’s all I really need to say.
BJ