Goodbye Facebook
January 1st, 2008 at 08:27pm
I don’t usually bother with new year’s resolutions, and this year was almost the same. When forced last night I managed to come up with not throwing toy darts at a particular work colleague…we’ll see how long that one lasts…but I do have a serious one.
I’ve been considering it for a while, and the new year is as good a reason as any to “deactivate” my Facebook account. I would prefer to get rid of it completely but that doesn’t appear to be possible. Unfortunately to deactivate it I have to answer a question about why I am leaving, I can’t see why this question is compulsory as it’s my choice if I don’t want to have any further part in the website. Anyway, my options are:
- This is temporary. I’ll be back.
- I have another Facebook account.
- I receive too many emails from Facebook.
- I don’t feel safe on the site.
- I don’t find Facebook useful.
- I spend too much time using Facebook.
- I don’t understand how to use the site.
- I need to fix something in my account.
- Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.
- Other (Please explain further)
Many of the options result in other text appearing with solutions to your problem in an effort to try and convince you to stay. My answer is “I don’t find Facebook useful” to which I receive the rather unhelpful advice that:
You might find Facebook more useful if you connect with more of your friends. Check out our Friend Finder, or search for them.
Also try taking a tour of Facebook to learn about features others find useful.
I’m not entirely sure why that would help when it is the number of friends which is half the problem. I don’t receive many emails from Facebook because I’m not particularly active on the site, the emails don’t bother me. What does bother me is that I have 34 Facebook friends, the vast majority of which I haven’t spoken to in over a year and, to be perfectly honest, I have almost no interest in their day-to-day activities, and yet every time I log in to Facebook to deal with one of the sporadic email notifications it sends to me, I am bombarded with useless information about every little thing they have done on Facebook lately. I currently have 25 bits of information about the activities of others sitting on my Facebook homepage, and only one of those bits of information is even remotely useful, and I received it by private email from the person anyway.
Amongst my collection of useless information I have the incredibly useful news that a person I barely know and a person I’ve never heard of “are now friends. They found each other using the Friend Finder”, another person I barely know “added the What fruit are you? application” (whatever that may be) and another person wrote a fake weather forecast.
Add to that my 38 pending requests which I have almost no interest in, summarised by Facebook thusly:
1 group invitation, 1 onetrack invitation, 4 petrolhead invitations, 2 you’re hot requests, 1 funwall friend request, 1 new wall post request, 1 are you interested? invitation, 1 blackjack invitation, 1 five year old fight invitation, 1 compare request, 1 compare request, 1 invite request, 1 cause invitation, 1 cause invitation, 1 risk invitation, 1 zombies invitation, 1 top friends friend request, 1 werewolves invitation, 3 werewolf invitations, 1 tv show trivia invitation, 2 my questions friend requests, 1 filthbook request, 2 ninja invitations, 1 texas hold’em invitation, 1 superpoke! friend request, 1 invite to pacman invitation, 3 likeness quiz requests, 1 pirate invitation.
This video seems to be a fairly accurate indication of how useless Facebook is for me.
I don’t use Facebook for anything and the concept doesn’t really interest me. The suggestion that adding more friends so that I can see more useless information was quite ridiculous. I avoided MySpace, and I will be more than happy to avoid Facebook from now on.
I’m sure it is very useful for some people, but I am not one of them. Goodbye Facebook, please do not bother me again. Account “deactivated”.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Samuel News,Samuel's Editorials
2 Comments
1. Tim | January 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
Haha, I like the video (they could have done a better job of recording the audio though).
If anything is going to destroy Facebook, I think it’s going to be the pointless applications and mass invites. I think most of the applications are a time waster too.
2. Mr-Pappadappadopolis | January 2nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Facebook is a load of garbage.