It might be too late, perhaps I have closed the barn door after the horses are gone… but…

I removed my Facebook account today. Or, as Facebook calls it “deactivated” it. I don’t know if it will be permanent but I am leaning that way. If you want to reach me in the meantime, try this.

Why oh why would I remove myself from the “trendiest” fad going? Well, I had completely ignored Facebook and MySpace when they came online… I always felt they were just vectors for being pestered by spammers and people I really didn’t want contact with. But last summer I broke down and signed up when I saw the wife making contact with many people she knew from school, and in a pang of nostalgia decided I would like to talk to some of those friends too. It annoyed the crap out of my from the start. Too many people would make contact, talk a little, get caught up and then vanish never to talk to me again. Just when I thought I was renewing old friendships I found out that what I was doing was simply touching base and then moving on again. That wasn’t MY intent, but apparently that’s all Facebook is to other people. Strike One.

Last night I pulled out ICQ again, a program I have not had installed on my PC since I rebuilt it into my upgraded package last year. I had it installed for a while before that as well without using it. On ICQ I found an old friend from way back in the BBS days who is also on Facebook and talked to him on ICQ. Rarely have we said much on Facebook but we chatted for some time on ICQ.

This really got me thinking: from the beginning of my online experiences, all the way back to my BBS in the 80s, I liked chatting and message boards. I was never a huge fan of many of the other aspects… as I transitioned from local dialup BBSes, to larger networked BBSes, to MSN Beta when it was in development, to dial-up Internet, the one common denominator was using it to talk to people. When I made the leap from MSN to Internet Direct in Toronto, I went through chat programs like shit through a goose sometimes. I was always on IRC with mIRC and pIRCh, or Telnetting into other chats. I tried out PowWow, but not many friends were on PowWow… I moved on to ICQ. My original ICQ number was a 6-digit number, but I lost my password and ended up with my current number (2773221) when I made a new account (new numbers are 9-digit numbers). I tried and LOATHED AOL IM… experimented with Yahoo!Pager (which has become Yahoo Messenger) and MSN Messenger (now Windows Live! Messenger) as they came into existence. If I was connected to the Internet, I was on ICQ and IRC, it was a given. If I wasn’t there, I was nowhere near the computer.

Over the last few weeks – ok, make that months – this has been what is going through my head:

• People treat Facebook like it is chat, at times… but it really isn’t. The messages are more like emails, and I would not bother to send 20 2-line emails back and forth to someone using Thunderbird or Gmail, so WHY would I do it on there? Too many messages just go unanswered altogether. This irritates the heck out of me.
• The platform was/is also inherently unstable. I can’t tell you how many times we have thought something was wrong with our internet connection because Facebook was dead, only to quickly discover it was just Facebook that was dead.
• It appears to be specifically designed to harvest information from you. That’s fine, if the information is ONLY available to Facebook so others can find you. But – as I will elaborate on below – that seems to not be the case…
• Facebook Applications, or rather application SPAM, sucks. If someone wants you to use their application, then they should make a useful application to appeal to you. There are many that are useful and fun – stuff like Dogbook and the like lets you extend Facebook to share information with your friends. But now, there is an epidemic of SPAMications – some stupid quiz that REQUIRES you to send invites to all your friends is NOT useful and fun. 99% of the Quiz apps are just quizzes you can do on the web any time you want to, repackaged to try and force you to bug the SHIT out of your friends. For every app that lets you find Wii friends, there are 100 that are basically virii, designed to replicate themselves as much as possible. Reporting them does no good.
• My privacy is important to me. I have been online for 20+ years in various environments, and on the Intarwebs for 13 years. In all that time, I have RARELY used my real name for any purpose. I have had some VERY bad experiences with online acquaintances, and by bad I mean DANGEROUS. I keep myself safe by not sharing my name, my address, my phone number or any other personal information with ANYONE other than someone I am doing business with or someone I trust. Yet, in order for Facebook to work, I must use my real name or there just is not any point to being there. I justified that it was all right since there are millions of people with the same name, and I had total control over who could see anything more about me. I have now learned that, in spite of my high-privacy settings, this is not the case.

So… I was never really happy with it, not from the first moment I was there. Strike Two.

The wife yapped at me today when I told her I had disabled my account. She was furious that I had not warned her that I was going to do it. If I had my druthers, I’d remove her account and my daughter’s as well. Because, in the last few days, I have had experiences which are what I would call “the last straw”.

First, I found that some of my ‘Facebook Friends’ had just vanished, without a word. To me, this meant that it wasn’t all that important to them that I was in touch, defeating the purpose of having my personal info on a site to allow me to get in touch with old friends.

Then, for no apparent reason, when I needed it, Facebook failed me AGAIN – I needed to send a message to someone who I had on Facebook, and my account was “offline for maintenance”. People who know me know that one thing that is sure to cost you something is if you aren’t there when I need you. My policy is, if you aren’t there when I need you, then don’t bother being around when I don’t need you.

Next, a person I thought I was very close to simply disregarded several Facebook messages – and began posting status messages making statements to the effect that they were going to take down their Facebook profile. It wasn’t that she said it one time – she had recently repeatedly suggested she “didn’t have time” for Facebook and was going to get rid of it. Since a primary reason for keeping Facebook all this time was to keep in touch with her, it was yet another nail in the coffin.

Finally – I began getting SPAM. I have a very low SPAM tolerance level. I come from the online days when SPAM didn’t exist. When it happened on the scene in the mid-90s, I reported every individual message I received to the owner of mail server at the IP address that was used to send it. By 1999, this became utterly impossible. I introduced filters and blocks to my internet world and hoped nothing important would get mis-flagged and lost. I get rare “OCCUPANT” type SPAM messages but never anything that could identify me specifically.

Until last week.

Last week, I began getting SPAM addressed to me. To my REAL name, and my email address, directed right into my home and bypassing all filters and blocks. The information in the SPAM belies the source quite clearly.

It comes via the one website where I use my real name. The one website where I am supposed to have my privacy protected from anyone I do not explicitly authorize to contact me. The one website which does not SHOW my email address, but does use it to maintain contact with me and inform me of “updates” from my account.

It came via Facebook.

Strike Three.