Goodbye Facebook!

This post is mostly for my friends on facebook. I’ve committed myself to phase out my use of facebook for a number of reasons.

a) A sense of false privacy: Although we think our photographs (primarily) are only visible to friends, the actual terms of license does not prevent facebook from publishing these pictures without your permission. Ever wondered about celebrity pictures popping up on Newspapers, with the caption, “Facebook picture” etc ? This is why they can get away with it. There’s some excellent rants on this topic. http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2007/11/18/photos-on-facebook-some-intellectual-property-concerns/ is an interesting one that showed up via a google search.

I’m choosing to use flickr.com to put my pictures up for public consumption. This way, I am under no illusion about the privacy of these pictures, and will think twice before I put them up.

b) Facebook takes up a lot of my time, and despite my good faith efforts, I seem to be logged in an inordinate amount of time. This is a waste of network resources and more importantly, my time.

c) The internet worked quite well for a few decades before these web based shims showed up. While I appreciate the graphics functionality of web2.0 technology, I think I would be more productive if I returned to a text based email medium for communication.

d) I have invested some time and energy into my own website, where I intend to move this blog, and a lot of my facebook information. Its meant to act as a central point of contact for friends, family and business associates. Unfortunately, a lot of this information was on a laptop which died recently, and is inaccessible until I fix it. This shouldn’t take too long though, since I have its innards strewn all over the dinner table of my sister, as I write this.

Its been fun, poking and voyeuring and walling and so on, on facebook. But all good things must come to an end.

To my friends on facebook: Please keep in touch via email ( I shall leave the profile information intact ). I shall try to get all your email addresses, either from your profile information, or my sending private messages. I shall also try somehow to move a lot of the private message conversations we’ve had to my email ( I’m sure someone’s written a tool for all this stuff somewhere and open sourced it. ). Until I fix it, do have an occassional peek at this blog. When I have things in place, I shall point the profile info to the entire website, etc.

Happy facebooking!