I finally bit the bullet and deleted my Facebook account yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it for a while as I don’t use it that much and my ‘friends’ were doing my head in.
It’s certainly addictive, I log on to check for any messages and then go and do something else. Five mins later I’m back again checking if I have any messages. It’s like looking at your mobile for any texts you may have missed – even though it vibrates like a pneumatic drill and has been within an inch of you for the past hour, you still check it every 5 mins ‘just incase’. Or is that just me?
I only had a handful of proper friends on there anyway; we all just missed the internet boom so I do actually still have mates who don’t have computers or social networking profiles…amazing eh! There will be some 16 year old reading this in shock and wonder how such things can happen.
Anyway, few Facebook gripes:
- People who feel the need to constantly update their status –Annoyingperson is in work. Annoyingperson is still in work. Annoyingperson is leaving work. Annoyingperson is on the bus. Annoyingperson is listening to my ipod. Annoyingperson is at home. Annoying person is going to bed. Etc. All within the space of 5 seconds….Arrrrrrggggghhhhhh
- People from your past adding you as a friend. If I/we wanted to stay in touch I/we would have
- People adding you as a friend and then never saying anything
- People who collect ‘friends’. There is no way people are mates with 500 people. No way Jose.
I haven’t even got started on Superwall videos or people throwing sheep at me.
All my friends have my phone number, have my email address or know where I live. It’s not impossible to stay in touch with me. I prefer people keeping in touch that way anyway, writing a Facebook wall post is just down right lazy I think.
I’ll be honest; the only thing I found Facebook useful for was to keep updated with any females I’m attracted to. Even that has got boring and annoying now the novelty has wore off. There are only so many drunken pouting pictures you can look at before you go mad.
It was fun while it lasted, but Facebook and I have come to the end of the road. It’s over now*.
*until I get totally bored one day and reactivate my ‘never properly deleted’ account, (unless I jump through hoops for them to remove me completely).
Hmm. Makes me wonder how long I’ll last on facebook. I’ve had my account for only a few months, I’m guessing, since sometime in the summer. I started with MySpace but really didn’t like it. I was only doing it for the blog. But then I was turned onto wordpress. But then…. blah blah blah. You get the idea.
I hope that I can do that soon..everytime I decide to do that..I get back & say what about sharing photos with friends??..I find it sometimes very useful to share it inside of meeting them & giving them the photos by hand..
I agree with all your points: that’s the reason I never opened a Facebook account
Cheers!
Sergio B.
Which are the (possibly convoluted) steps to definetely delete a facebook account ? I really mean for ever-and-ever deleted..
is it a publicly known procedure ?
I’m so addicted to blogging, I couldn’t afford the time to be addicted to anything else! Good on you then!
Sonny – just wait until you get sheep flung at you constantly
gamb – I thought the same but there are lots of photo sharing sites out there. Photobucket or Flickr spring to mind immediately. Just send your friends the link to your photos.
Sergio – great minds…
Valerio – I deleted mine and it said my account has been ‘deactivated’. My account still lingers there if I want to retrieve it (friend lists, photos etc). Proper deletion meant emailing them, I’m not sure what else after that – I didn’t read further on. I’m not too fussed as long as my account isn’t active.
S. Le – I have the attention span of a gnat, I’ll be onto something else next week.
I’ve never been on facebook, but it sounds dangerous. People throw sheep at you?!?
That’s a heck of an ice-breaker.
Aah, I know what you mean about the sheep throwing thing. In fact, all those applications are annoying! I quite like the people from my past getting in touch part though. Being from an army family we moved around a LOT and it was easy to lose touch with people I would actually have quite liked to keep in touch with.
Oh, and I’m one of those people with lotzs of friends – not quite 500 but 230. I do actually know all of them. Honest!
You’ll be back.
I don’t use facebook to it’s full advantage, it lost its appeal once people starting limiting their profiles so you couldn’t be really nosey and click from person to person.
Thanks Cynical Scribble, for leaving a comment on my blog too
Appreciate your visit, but was surprised that my Trackback didn’t show here.
Dan – that’s only the tip of the iceberg
bevchen – that makes sense if you are all over the place. I like people from my past getting in touch too, it just annoyed me that they went to the trouble of finding me on there and then didn’t even manage an hello. Must be me
Jo – yep, I know I probably will go back in a few months. I’m too nosey not to! One thing myspace was good for was people surfing
Evans – Not 100% sure how the trackback thing works but I just found it in my spam box. I’ve un-spammed it :p (by the way, your link sent a gazillion people my way, cheers!)
I’m gradually losing interest in Facebook especially since I’ve had a few old school “friends” who want to be my friend. I don’t think I even talked to some of them while at school so why are they interested now. Makes me think they are just being nosey as to what I am or not doing with my life!
Hmm, I don’t agree with you on the Facebook thing, but I know that it doesn’t suit everyone – but that’s the way of everything in the world! You can’t please all people all of the time. I don’t like Myspace or Bebo, and it took me a good while to find the new-look BBC website bearable. So, you see, it’s just another case of people having different tastes.
I’m not 16. I have mates who prefer to not use Facebook. I still call people to arrange meeting up and, shock horror, I still meet my friends face-to-face. For all the people who lambast the site for taking away the personal element of communication, exactly the same was said of the SMS craze, but we seem to have gotten over that now, and I fully expect something else will come along that outrages more. Just give it time.
The same is true of the friends thing. I have 423 friends and, bar the ones met through blogging (who I am getting to know), I know each and every one of them (but that might be more to do with my role immediately post-university and the impact it had on my social sphere). I’m also not sure of the comment about “if I had wanted to stay in touch with you, I would have”. When I was at school, I was bullied and generally grateful to cut ties of the place. In the 7 years since I left, I have grown hugely as a person. I am not the same girl I was. The same is true of the girls I went to school with – and I am glad to be back in contact with many who I was grateful to see the back of. Life has afforded us all the luxury of maturing into decent human beings, far from the snipey playground days of secondary education…
Welcome after, Cynical Scribble. I actually went to the length of removing the account altogether almost a year ago. Haven’t looked back since. The process is well hidden someplace in their help system, but absolutely doable.
I just joined Facebook and it’s yet another opportunity to feel like a loser. I’m 43 and my 43 year-old friends refuse to join (they’re proudly “too old for that stuuf”). So I have 5 friends…three of whom are “friend collectors” as you say. Your post rang true. I’m so annoyed I may just join you…except, how will I stalk my old boyfriends? Google is too damn limiting.
Facebook sucks, but not all the time. Most of it is just stupid, what the fuck are all those stupid application things all about. I don’t use it much, I have no real need, and I don’t go tracking down people I don’t actually know in real life. It can be fun sometimes, but only sometimes. Mainly for seeing other peoples pictures of nights out etc.
Michelle – yep that’s what I was on about (if not explained very well) and one of the reasons I’ve thrown the towel in.
Blue Soup – As I’ve said in the comments above, I like people from my past getting in touch – I’m mates with loads of people from growing up/school days – I just never understood the mentally to add people on Facebook as a ‘friend’ and then never actually message or say anything to them. I don’t see the point in being a ‘friend’ with someone just because that person knew them years ago from school/work/wherever. I knew everyone on my friends list, but I’d rather not have the majority of them know what I’m upto just because they are on my Facebook friends list.
Again, maybe that’s just my experience of it. People find it useful and use it like it should be used, whereas I didn’t find the need to and I just got fed up with it in the end. PS. Sorry, but I did actually like the BBC site when it changed
hehe
Asgeir – I know it’s doable to delete completely. I’ve left it ‘deactivated’ for now. I’ll probably fire it back up again in 12 months when I’m bored and have my nosey head on!
Jodi – one of the few delights of facebook was it’s stalking capabilities. Mine has been left as ‘deactivated’ just incase I ever need it in the future!
Jaggy – I agree, I didn’t need to use it, or get anything out of using it, it just started getting on my nerves for no apparent reason. It might be me with problems and not Facebook!
Hi – saw this today about Facebook (you might have already seen it) but I thought of your post. Enjoy!
haha that made me laugh. I hadn’t seen that Michelle, therefore you get this weeks Gold Star
I meant to blog about deactivating Facebook… because of the amusing way they try to hold on to you. I can’t remember what the exact phrases were, but did you not love the:
Why are you leaving Facebook?
a) Because I have no friends! (and then it tells you how you can find more friends)
b) I spend too much time on Facebook (they tell you how to stop receiving emails??)
c) I was being stalked (you’re told how to change your security settings)
d) (Quote) “Facebook is creating social drama for me”(!)
I can’t remember the rest, or what fantastic suggestions they make but I thought it was fantastic!
Despite all of this, I’m still an avid Facebook fan and agree with a lot of what Blue Soup had to say. I have over 500 friends, but also hate Fried Collectors. Every now and then I go through and delete the ones I don’t know (or no longer need, such as the ex-coach of a rugby team I needed to contact for past tournaments etc). Those friends are 3yrs worth of university socialising, 3yrs worth of being in the military and I went to 2 of the 3 secondary schools in my town so know the majority of people my age when I returned home from uni!
So… don’t judge a girl by her Facebook!
ooh, that reminds me. I haven’t been on facebook all morning!
Hello expensive…neither have I. I’m strangely missing it in some wierd way though, it’s evil ways are subconsciously pulling me back in already.
“My name is Cynical and it’s been 15 days since I last facebooked”
Cue applause…
Did you go back? I was like you for probably about a year. I just didn’t ‘get it’. But now I am hooked. I like the fact that I can upload holiday photos withuot having to send them out individually to people on email. I like that I can find out what my friends are up to without always going to the effort of emailing and phoning. I’ve never been good with phoning people. When I went to Aus recently lots of old Aussie friends who I’d lost touch with found out I was going, and invited me over to various places all over the country. I can walk away from it and sometimes don’t look at it for weeks. I think it adds something positive to my life in all honesty.
The one thing that pisses me off though is random people trying to become my ‘friend’ – my pub landlord, a VERY long term ex (who i did not stay in touch with – for a good reason) and some users at work (people I have never met). I don’t decline them, I just leave them so they never need to know they were declined.
I tell you what does worry me about Facebook now though… I read yesterday that they recently changed the Terms and Conditions so that even if you leave the site and delete your account, they still own everything you ever put on it.
Soup – Scary but anything you ever write on a computer, especially the internet should always be treated with a certain amount of caution. You never know who’ll be reading in 1,2,5,10,100 years time
Time Traveller – I did go back a few months ago to have a nose, but it’s been left in situ ever since.
I can see why people find it useful, but its not my cup of tea and I don’t have a need for it (I don’t have friends dotted around the country or anything). None of my main group of mates are on Facebook and I’m quite a private person, so I’m uncomfortable with what people can know just by reading the wall/photos etc. I might just be overly paranoid though *starts wearing tin foil hat*.
Maybe I just need to get more mates (or new mates) on facebook!
Blue Soup – I read about them T&C’s on my interweb travels yesterday, scary stuff. *dons tin foil hat*
Facebook bites… constantly being updated about stupid things from friends who I don’t talk to ( supposed friends ) I think facebook is just a way for some people to feel that their lives have some significance. I mean if your a fat old housewife living in the burbs with 2 kids and a husband who is no longer giving it to you what better to do than join facebook and spend hours contacting people who couldn’t stand you in high school. I don’t understand the need to have 900 friends… I ditched facebook this week and Im happy… no more distractions no more stupid updates from people I don’t care about.
John – Hi John, I’m well out of the Facebook loop now, I might go back on to have a nosey and see what I’m not missing!