Facebook Finito.

I'm pulling out of Facebook.  If not completely, than at least all but.  This has nothing to do with the many friends, family, and colleagues I have linked virtual arms with there (good and worthy souls, one and all).  It has everything to do with Facebook itself and, to a lessor extent, with what I will call the Facebook effect.

I'll be direct: as a service, Facebook sucks. They have misused user data, repeatedly lied about their privacy policies and practices, changed their privacy settings so frequently that nobody could ever hope to keep up with them (including flipping default settings back and forth regularly), and finally been placed under audit for the next twenty years because of it. That should be bad enough for me or anyone else. 

I mean, I'm the first to admit that in our country there is no such thing as user privacy and I know full well that our personal data isn't owned by us by rather by any corporation that can collect it.  That is the state of privacy laws (or the lack thereof) here in the US. Facebook is merely one more such owner of our personal data. However, their track record is decidedly worse than most. They simply cannot be trusted to even correctly inform their users what they are or are not doing with user data. For me, that is finally unacceptable. They can keep (will keep, let's face it) such data as they already have from me, but no more will be coming their way.

Their user interface is also a complete mess. There is crap all over the place, most of it nothing I want or even care about. Does anybody really understand which posts show up in the news stream anymore, or how that algorithm works? If you do, that's just this week's algorithm, so don't get used to it.

SPAM, viruses, "games," and targeted ads (which seldom seem in any way -that I can fathom- related to me or my account activity) clutter every spare inch of the visual landscape. Blech. Whose account got hijacked this week? Don't follow any of their links!

The mobile apps written by Facebook for Facebook are even worse. Half the time links don't take you to the comments or photos associated with them, posts don't reliably work, notifications [I must have fat-fingered that word because my iPad just auto-corrected it to "orifice tons", which is rather prescient of it in this context] are flaky and inconsistent, and the whole app is likely to crash at any time. Also, there are lots of features that it doesn't support on mobile platforms. Some 3rd party mobile apps for Facebook are arguably better, but they seem to have regular trouble with shifting APIs and each one of them gets a different news stream view somehow, none of them complete.

Finally, there is the Facebook effect. The compulsion to over-share and to over-check. The growing sense of dependence on external validation, posting for the comments. Deny it if you dare, for it is a large part of why folks keep sharing away. I know users with many hundreds of "friends" who will never leave this sheltered circle of instant and constant validation. This is an effect.

I have played with this social network for roughly as many years as it has been around, and have found I am no more immune to this effect than the next person. I have seen it change the nature of what I post over time, and have decided that isn't me. It doesn't feel healthy. It feels like narcissism, in fact. [Merrium-Webster uses as an example under their definition of narcissism: "in his narcissism, he just assumed that everyone else wanted to hear the tiny details of his day."] So I am pulling out of the FB posting game for this reason, too.

That itch can also be scratched over at Google+ (if it ever achieves a critical mass of users), and without all the SPAM and visual distractions. More control over postings, better photo album tools and options, and a delightfully clean view of the content you came to see. Of course, Google also sells your user data in the aggregate to corporate marketing arms, but at least such privacy options as they provide don't switch around every few weeks.  I'll keep a toe in that pond to see if it matures and grows.  And in Twitter, too, which remains the best of the social network/information tools, so far.  You can follow me there (@kevmckonline), if you care to.

My Facebook association, though, will now languish.  I will check occasionally, but otherwise, in the words of the very quotable Douglas Adams, "So long, and thanks for all the fish."