There are a lot of people who now believe that the world exists within Facebook, sadly I am not one of them. I have had my account for probably four or five years, but included in that time was a two year period where it was deactivated because I couldn't see a reason to use it. About twelve or so months ago it was reactivated and has remained so until this morning, but really the fact that I couldn't see much point behind it three years still remains.
I know that there are many excellent uses for it and I am totally behind social networking, but just in this case there is little in it for me. I am already contactable nearly constantly regardless of where I am in the world and don't gain out of having yet another way to do it. Between six or seven different email accounts, mobile phone and SMS, Skype, four different Instant Messaging accounts, this under utilised web log, regular mail and various types of birds that can be trained to carry messages it shouldn't be too hard to find me. Hell, if you know your way around Google you can probably still find my previous home address in Adelaide if you know where to look.
"But with all that why not just keep your Facebook account active, what is one more?" I hear people asking and I guess they are right. But I make nearly zero use of Facebook. I don't want to post status messages. If I want to put up photos they will go on something like Flickr. I can't see the point in commenting on the majority of things people post and really who out there gives a toss if I "Like" their drunken photos from last weekend or their latest witty observation.
Even with all that my biggest annoyances with Facebook is that people are Friends. I have an old fashioned and probably quite weird view (well weird at the moment) of what a friend is. When I first used Facebook I was very limiting and only added people as Friends if they really were, this time it was a little different, but I still couldn't help but feel wrong about it every time I added someone I didn't really know or a person from the past who found me to inflate their Friend count. A number of my best and closest friends choose not to use Facebook so really me posting stuff on there really was excluding the people I love most.
At first it occurred to me to just leave the account and not bother using it if I didn't want too, but that seemed silly. This way people actually know I do not see or check it so there will be less chance of things getting mailed to me in Facebook and me not seeing them.
Is this the end of Ryan and the Facebooks??? Probably not, I rarely say never and so there may come a time in the future, it could be next week, where I can see the value behind it for me again.