Why I Left (but re-joined) Facebook

(NOTE: I eventually reactivated my Facebook account in order to re-instate the 2214 fan page. The original rant is left intact to reflect my opinions at the time)

I set up a Facebook account in the spring of 2009, deleted it once, came crawling back a few months later, and have been struggling with whether or not to hang on to it. As someone who wants to market to the broadest audience possible, it seemed like an important tool.

Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. A lot of irrelevant and generally uninteresting material was sent my way during my time there but my main reason for finally leaving was the fact that my personal information was being abused by pseudo-applications. Spam SMS messages started appearing on my phone, which, to be fair, may not have started from Facebook apps but there were very few sites that had my number.

Political discussions among some of my friends had devolved into derogatory hate speech and insults. Religious messages were everywhere. People are certainly entitled to free speech but I didn't enjoy the bombardment every time I wanted to check the news feed. The Farmville, Petville, you-name-it-ville spam got on my nerves rather horribly, too.

The biggest problem I had with the site was the fact that they pretty much could do anything they wanted with my identity. I'd volunteered only information that wasn't of a personal nature; it's nothing you couldn't find by looking up the domain for Nitrocosm.com. Even so, spammers don't need much to get started. All that aside, it was an increasing sensation of mistrust that finally convinced me to pull the plug.

An unintended consequence of my account deletion was the deletion of the 2214 fan page. I'd hoped that page would remain after I left but it went away. To those who became a fan of that page, I apologize. Please e-mail me if there's something with which you'd like me to replace that page. If enough people request it, I'll bring back the forums (which were only removed because no one was using them). Speaking of the forums, I have full backups and they can be restored (all posts and accounts intact) if there's a demand for them.

So... yeah. Social networking is popular but there is a danger in volunteering too much information about yourself. It may not be in the form of identity theft but it could lead to annoyances and headaches. To each his or her own, of course. I'm working hard to move back towards reasonable privacy and simplified Internet use. After all, what's wrong with plain old e-mail?