This morning I deleted my Facebook account. It’s not Quit Facebook Day yet but I couldn’t see any reason to stay any longer.
What did I do? On Twitter, Kathryn asked if I would blog what I did “re: keeping social links/info before deletion”. My quick answer was that I didn’t do all that much really: “picked out the people who aren’t on any of my other social networks, looked at their profiles”.
These are the steps I took:
- looked through my friends list
- opened the profiles of people I wanted to find more information for
- wrote information down where I found it (e.g. email addresses, birthdays, and in one or two cases, where they’ve shared it, jotted down their children’s names.)
- finally, while still logged into FB, I clicked on this link http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
I now can’t even tell you how many friends I had in FB – somewhere between 100 and 200 I think. I looked at 24 profiles in more detail, however not all of those people shared their email addresses. If I had had more FB friends it would have been quite a time consuming process.
Of these 24 people, 3 were old friends (1 didn’t list any email address).
4 were old high school friends – 3 from Malaysia, 1 from Perth.
5 were acquaintances – friends of siblings, other friends, people I don’t know all that well, etc.
4 were people I used to work with.
7 I classify as “professional acquaintances” – other librarians I haven’t worked directly with or people who have worked at the same university but not librarians.
The thing that struck me most while looking over the friends list was that I have been connecting with most of my FB friends in other ways – either using online methods including other social media like Twitter and Flickr, my blog, or email, or in realtime, using the good old face-to-face method. I found that those FB friends I didn’t connect with much on FB, I don’t connect with elsewhere either. So even though I’ve written down their email addresses, I don’t know if I will be emailing them much anyway. Many of my FB friends would fall into the “acquaintances” category, but I know where they work or have their contact details already, so I didn’t bother to go and collect that information again. I think this shows how Facebook hasn’t really been very important to me as a means of connecting and communicating with others. I haven’t been using it all that much over the past few months – and what use I made of it didn’t seem particularly meaningful to me: when I logged in I would look at what had been posted, respond to any messages, delete requests, hide Farmville-type game requests/information, then log out.
I assume FB is more meaningful for other FB users, and they are growing/developing their relationships with others using the site. It is probably more difficult for other FB users to quit. For me, I probably just didn’t use it enough for it to be a really good way of communicating and staying in touch with others. It certainly wasn’t my main means of interacting with others online. Life will go on just fine without it.
2 Comments
I’ve thought about doing the same. I’ve never been much of a FB user. I think I have about 30 connections on there, most of whom aren’t active. Having said that my sister’s web store does have an active FB fan page which ties in to her web store. I’m an admin for that so I will need to keep my FB page.
It’s not that I don’t like the concept of FB, I just find it very difficult to engage with from a usability point of view. I really don’t understand what is happening most of the time. Sometimes there are things that I want to only share with family, not a wider group and not the public.
I would have been quite happy for the default settings to be public as long as I knew for certain that I could control individual messages or artefacts and make them private if required. I was never convinced that i could do that so in the end I shut down every setting but then I am still not sure that it is all private which means that I just don’t post there anymore. In the end this means why bother.
The lesson is that FB made life too complicated and uncertain. So goodbye FB.
I think your last paragraph says it very well – as a result of Facebook I am connecting with a bunch of people I had lost touch with and/or would like to keep a loose eye on. I do use it to communicate with more personal friends than professional. It also appears to be where many of my friends are hanging out.
Twitter for me is more the professional stuff and I quite like having the distinction between the two.