So long Facebook

After com­ing to the real­iza­tion that I spend more and more time hid­ing silly appli­ca­tions and opt­ing out of oth­ers, I’ve decided to expe­ri­ence life with­out Facebook.

How many of you have joined a record club where you weren’t given the choice to pur­chase the record of the month, but were only given the oppor­tu­nity to not make the pur­chase? And of that num­ber, how many of you own CDs you never intended to pur­chase? This is the premise upon which Face­book operates.

I think social net­work­ing has only scratched the sur­face of what it can become and I look for­ward to see­ing the advances that will be made in the months and years to come. How­ever, I am not going to fall into the trap of being just one more Face­book user, lin­ing up to be used for ad-targeting data with­out my knowl­edge. I’m sure Face­book has more than its fair share of sheeple (or is that lem­mings) and won’t miss my par­tic­i­pa­tion a bit.

I own sev­eral Web sites, each one of them with an Invi­sion Power Board forum and/or a Invi­sion Blog or Word­Press blog. So I’m already doing my share of pro­vid­ing sites where peo­ple can make social con­nec­tions. Main­tain­ing these sites can be a lot of work on some days, but I do it because I want to do it. As a result, my efforts on my own sites and the time I spend par­tic­i­pat­ing on other Web sites eats up large chunks of my free time. So much time that I do not have time to play com­puter games online or on my own boxes.

But it seemed every time I logged into Face­book, there was another farm game, or aquar­ium game or mafia game I needed to opt out of. If I had time to play games, I wouldn’t have minded hav­ing the oppor­tu­nity to opt in, but I really don’t have the time. Nor do I have the time to see how many ani­mals you have on your farm, or how many fish you have in your aquar­ium. So I spent a lot of my Face­book time hid­ing silly appli­ca­tions. A waste of time, if you want my per­sonal opinion.

Other Face­book users that play the games can’t under­stand my posi­tion, but the sim­ple fact is if I had time to sit down and cus­tomize Face­book to suit my own needs, I would have done just that. If I wanted to visit your farm to see how you were doing, I would have done just that.

Face­book went from being a con­ve­nient means to recon­nect and stay in touch with friends and fam­ily to being a thorn in my side.

For those of you that can­not see Facebook’s Open Graph API is any­thing but, please take the blue pill and wash it down with the Kool-Aid. To put it in the most sim­ple terms I can, Face­book is using you to make it eas­ier for them to col­lect even more data about you. If it were truly open, it would work on other social net­work­ing sites, but the sim­ple fact is that it is com­pletely pro­pri­etary and only works on, what else… Facebook.

I have to laugh at how Face­book claims to embrace OpenID, yet they aggres­sively push Face­book Con­nect down everyone’s throat.

And if you seri­ously believe Face­book isn’t har­vest­ing data that you are unaware of, then take a look at this site. Read it before you take that blue pill.

If you still think Face­book is the wave of the future, that works for me. Just remem­ber every­thing you post there has the pos­si­bil­ity of being hijacked. Even click­ing on their ‘Like’ but­ton can open your feed up to spam­mers, so please watch what you are doing. Your pri­vate data is being shared with every appli­ca­tion you install, so think before you click. How many of you are famil­iar with Face­book CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ethics?

For those that still feel leav­ing Face­book is a mis­take, remem­ber when you thought MySpace was the be-all and end-all of social networking?

Related posts:

1. Deci­sions, decisions…
2. being new does not make it better

Tagged as: FaceBook, Invision, WordPress