I opened a facebook account a good while ago to be present in communication channels where our community is. I’ve closed that account, with a host of pending “friend” requests from community members, and here’s why.
On one hand, there’s all the “you wanna be a friends of a northern-german elderly guy with a click” thing, and the “what’s the value of my life at NASDAQ”. But if facebook would have worked for me, I would have continued to bite that bullet.
The real reason I left is that facebook doesn’t work for me. My role at Mozilla is to talk and engage with people all over the world. Many of them came back with friend requests on facebook. Their friends came back with friend requests. Now, most of what they’re putting up on facebook is targetted to their social circle, and, in their language. Which is cool, but my facebook feed just turned into a series of stuff I can’t read.
And being your friend and then mute you? That’d be just rude.
I haven’t communicated there really. So, I’ve stopped being on facebook. I’m still in that 14-day grace period, but I cleared my cookies to make it through that.
If you want to keep in touch, subscribe to this blog, or catch me on twitter. And then there’s irc and email, of course.
I intend to stay on twitter for the forseeable future. I’m not fond of their promo-tweets, but I enjoy the asymmetric nature of connections there. I have no plans to join other social networks at this point.
