I decided to delete my public Facebook account. There are loads of reasons, but the main frustration is that you are only allowed 5000 friends and I had hit that mark for the second time (having deleted 300 names a month or so ago - those who were my actual friends as I have another account for them). But I was also overwhelmed with invites to events and all the messages I was getting were amounting to being spam and frankly I am finding Facebook a bit unwieldy and confusing anyway.
I am keeping on my "Fan" Page, which has no limit on numbers of followers so come and join me there if you haven't already. My other page is for people I am actually really friends with, so don't be offended if I reject you from there. Even if you are one of my real acquaintances. I am old now and find it hard to remember even my good friends or to tell the difference between Will and Tom at 6Music.
It's actually quite hard to delete an account. You can deactivate fairly easily but it seemed to me that that meant the page was still visible to everyone, which isn't much good to anyone. I eventually googled it and found a way to delete, but Facebook don't make it easy to leave them behind and I think I would have to jump through even more hoops for the info to be totally erased.
Even now it will take 2 weeks before the account has gone.
I am actually glad to have simplified things and it's interesting how these social networks come in and out of fashion. I still have a myspace account but only go there very occasionally and Facebook is something I look at every day but which I get little pleasure from these days. It's all about Twitter for me now, which seems to be holding my interest after well over a year. But will that too seem outdated and become a ghost town of lost souls? Or be overwhelmed by spam and bots? I hope not and at the moment it seems unthinkable, but in half a year something else will come along and we fickle nerds will leave it behind, all broken and needy, desperately trying to grab our attention by hopelessly attempting to copy the thing that has usurped it.
