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.
Congrats!
I took myself off of Facebook months ago, and I do not regret it. As I expand in my work and personal life, Twitter and whatever else comes next will suffice just fine.
Enjoy the freedom! When all is said and done, I find life is more meaningful with the direct, purposeful interaction. (…But you will feel like an outlier.)
Comment by Mike McCarthy — June 16, 2012 @ 10:05 am
well, one might refuse facebook for its promotion of discrimination and censorship, but that works too
Comment by john — June 16, 2012 @ 1:59 pm
Yeah, Facebook isn’t really designed for the scenario you describe. It works well for communicating with *actual* friends, and for following organisations you’re interested in. But for anything that isn’t one or the other – e.g the larger and looser structure of an open-source development community, it doesn’t work very well.
I much prefer setups like Planet Mozilla for that kind of thing – I can easily get an overview of what’s happening through my RSS reader, while easily skipping stuff I don’t care about. And of course, it has the benefit of being a much more open system…
Comment by Simon — June 17, 2012 @ 3:42 pm
G+? It seems to have the best of Twitter minus the micro-blogging limit.
I still have a toe in the murky FB water, but really only use FB to keep my family and (highschool) friends’ contacts… it is hard to convince 100+ people to switch away – especially as so many of them are fond of stupid FB games too.
Comment by Mike — June 17, 2012 @ 10:07 pm
Re G+, I think that google knows enough about me
Comment by Axel Hecht — June 18, 2012 @ 3:18 am