For a while I've been considering dropping Facebook. About a year ago I realised I was spending a lot of time checking messages on Twitter and checking status updates on Facebook. It became a bit of a consuming habit and one that I recognised was not very productive. So, I went through a culling phase and stopped following a lot of people on Twitter, and removed everyone from my Facebook friends list apart from a handful of real friends and family members.
It was a great feeling. For the first time in ages, I felt free to write on Facebook about my family without worrying about how public I was making my life. On Twitter, I simply stopped posting and grew out of the habit of using the site.
For a time, all was well. I'd managed to reconnect with family members I hadn't seen for years, and was posting updates on my family. It was nice.
But then Google+ came along and I realised this was a social network that seemed to be doing things the right way. It made Facebook up its game and they started pushing out some of the features that might have made me think twice about my friend cull (the lists feature made it possible to limit posts to lists of people - think Google+ circles).
And for a time, all was still well. I was using twitter very rarely to get titbits from people associated with Doctor Who; I was using Facebook to speak to my family, and I was using my Google+ to speak to everyone else.
But recently I've grown disenchanted with this arrangement. It seems I've been hanging on to a Facebook account for no real reason other than to make it easier for my family to keep up to date with me. This is all in Google+ however, and the line between my thinking on both services was starting to grate.
So, I disabled by Facebook account yesterday. If you haven't done this already, you should try it. It's so funny. Deactivating your account does very little. When you click the link to deactivate, Facebook throws a few images of your friends on the screen telling you that 'John Smith will miss you', etc. Ha. How desperate are they?
Disabling your account does very little by the way. None of your data is removed and the next time you log back in, everything is as it was before. I knew this, but I figured it was a good mental exercise to see if I was truly bothered by not logging into Facebook.
I survived the day though, and by the end of it decided that I was going to go ahead and delete my Facebook account. Even this process isn't straight forward. Go ahead and try to find the link on Facebook...go and take a look...did you find it? I did a search on Google+ and some helpful souls posted the link you need. Steve Krause wrote this article about the process How to permanently delete your Facebook account (It's this if you're interested http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account.)
I clicked the link about an hour ago.
I then shared a Google+ post with my family so they'd know that I wasn't on Facebook anymore.
Deleting my Facebook account was something I should have done a long time ago.
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