I’m in an abusive relationship. I’m constantly disrespected. I feel violated all the time. My feelings mean nothing. I’m uncared for. Yet… I can’t leave. I never can leave.
But I want to leave you, Facebook.
Leaving Facebook is something I’ve been trumpeting since last year as Facebook continues over and over again to disregard the privacy of its community. It being a powerhouse company, it feels that it doesn’t have to do anything to benefit its users. It’s all about Facebook and its users are just going to have to enjoy the ride, no matter how bad it is.
Every time I try to leave Facebook, I keep getting pulled back in. It’s not really by choice, unfortunately. I hate to say this, but the use of Facebook is a “need” in this day and age of social media. But what exactly is keeping me around?
Friends
Way way way way back in the day, when MySpace was king and Facebook had just opened to the public, I convinced my friends to leave the kingdom of MySpace and come over to this new-found territory. MySpace was overrun with horrible backgrounds with hard to read text, auto-playing music and videos, and just overall terrible design. Facebook was new, clean, crisp. No custom backgrounds. No auto-playing anything. Just… clean and simple.
That was four years ago.
Today, Facebook, although still a nicely laid out and simple to read website, has turned into an even bigger monster compared to MySpace. It cares not for your privacy. It cares not for your settings. Any information you give Facebook, it feels it rightfully owns and can do anything it wants with it. (But don’t you dare request YOU do anything you want with that information that is in fact yours.) Ask for your permission to do anything? Pfft… it’s 500 million strong. It’s a monster that feels it can do anything it wants now.
Pages
It’s that 500 million members that makes Facebook a popular destination. Major companies and organizations are going to look at those numbers and say “hey… we need to be there too!”. I cannot deny this fact and had helped a couple of organizations jump onto the Facebook bandwagon and created Fan pages for them.
As I help administer these Fan Pages, I have to keep my Facebook account. If I were to delete my account, these Fan Pages were disappear. Of course, the proper way around that is to add another administrator to these pages (which I have), but I’m sure in the infinite wisdom that is Facebook, deleting my account will somehow still remove these pages. It just wouldn’t be Facebook without some stupid reasoning.
Coverage
Sure, we who keep an eye on tech know about all of Facebook’s terrible decision making when related to privacy, but we’re most likely just a very small percentage of those 500 million members. This means Facebook will definitely remain popular for quite some time. That means, as a tech enthusiast who likes to keep an eye on all things happening, I’m required to keep a Facebook account.
Facebook just rolled out two new features (Places and an expanded version of Messaging). If I’m to understand how these features work, I have to keep using Facebook. There’s no way around it. This doesn’t mean I have to ACTIVELY use Facebook. It just means I need to keep an active Facebook account, ensuring that I log into it every once in a while.
I’ve been having a hard time trying to stay away from Facebook. I’m doing what I can to ensure that I do nothing with my profile. I’m going to try and make sure that the only things going into my Facebook feed is information from other web services (my blog, FourSquare, etc.) that won’t really point out a lot about my opinion on things that some of my friends or family would be a little sensitive to. (Such as when my parents drive me crazy. … Which is often.) I won’t be posting any status updates to Facebook. I will continue to comment on friends’ status updates. It will also allow me to do something I’ve been very adamant against: friending my family.
But until other new service comes around who actually shows they care and understands the true social nature and understanding of its users, I’m stuck being Facebook’s bitch.