Facebook has gone from a very private way to communicate with only the people you want to communicate with, to a firehose of information about you and everyone you kinda-sorta know.
@jfloyd pointed out this article earlier today, and it pretty much sums up why I have been changing my relationship with Facebook for a while.
Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.
Sorry Facebook. It’s not me, it’s you.
You can expect to continue getting the occasional booty call from me–I’ll let you know when I need something (every time I post), but don’t expect much more. I look forward to your minions Liking my content. In fact, I encourage them to do so. And you can do with that information what you like.
But I really need our relationship to be one sided. As a great man…errrrr golfer…errr playa once said, “You gotta do this for me. Huge. Quickly. Bye.”
**UPDATE**
One of the developers of the World Wide Web, Robert Cailliau, explains in a TechCrunch interview why he isn’t on Facebook: “I can get in, but I can’t get out.”