It was with some difficulty that I made the decision last week to permanently delete my Facebook account.
It's not that I don't find the service useful. I really do. I've been using it to keep in casual contact with relatives and former high school classmates whom I otherwise would speak to rarely or not at all. It's social, but without the same kind of investment that comes from talking on the phone, or visiting in person, or writing a letter. In fact, that's one of the more common complaints about Facebook--"They're not your real friends! Facebook just creates the illusion of relationships!"--but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. There's a spectrum of closeness in relationships, and you will always know some people with whom you would have difficulty sustaining a real conversation, but you like to see what they're up to nowadays.
It really was a tough choice to kick all that to the curb. I have been using Facebook since I was in college and the service was still called "TheFacebook." Admittedly, back then it was useful in an entirely different way than it is now--I used it to look up lab partners whose names I didn't recognize and people who arranged to buy textbooks from me on campus. The voyeuristic angle to it was already there, too; browsing through the profiles of friends and their friends was addictive and time-consuming but very, very satisfying. Most people left their profiles open to their network (i.e. their entire university), because just knowing it was a closed community limited to people who were like us gave the site an illusion of safety and trust that was lacking from competitors like MySpace.
That was really the primary appeal of Facebook. Let's face it: there are things we're completely comfortable sharing with some people but not others. Facebook's privacy changes (most or all motivated by marketing potential) don't acknowledge that, and they fundamentally undermine the entire reason I had joined the site to begin with. That's why I'm quitting. I don't really want my boss, my parents and my high school acquaintances communicating with me in the same space as my college and online friends. Sure, there are granular privacy settings now, but after repeated snafus resulting in previously-private data being set public without the user's knowledge, I don't trust Facebook to keep those things separate.
Plus there's the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's creator, has been kind of a scumbag from the beginning. The more I find out about the guy, the less I trust his website with managing my semi-private communications.
There aren't a lot of alternatives right now, unfortunately, but Diaspora looks very, very cool. If or when they get that up and running, maybe I'll join it. Until then, you'll have to contact me the old-fashioned way: by leaving a comment on my blog.
I've been thinking about quitting Facebook, myself. Mostly just on principle, just because I hate the idea of supporting a website/company that treats it's users like a resource to be exploited instead of, you know, people. I just haven't actually decided what I'm going to do yet. I'm definitely watching Diaspora, and I think I like where they are going. In the meantime, I'm emptying my Facebook profile as much as I can (even though they definitely don't make it easy...) and locking down everything that's still in my control.
I'm still on the fence about FaceBook. I didn't want to join it in the first place, and I've been burned by it recently, but my family and friends have told me how much they value my presence on the site.
What really gets me about the way FaceBook has evolved is that instead of supporting functionality that users want (see: ReTweets, lists, etc.) they're actively trying to change how we use their system. How useful is a service that changes the user?
Until Diaspora gets up and running, I'll probably stay on there. Esp. because it seems that a lot of the jobs I'm looking at have a social media bend to them, and not being on FB might preclude me from hiring.
That's kind of the prevailing attitude about Facebook: "I don't like it, but I'm not willing to quit because my social network is there."
There was a point where I just had to say screw it. Nobody will ever leave unless their friends start leaving. That's what Facebook is banking on. They can lie to you, allow all kinds of things to be done with your data, but most people will still be adverse to leaving (my favorite is the "I've got nothing to hide" defense) or, if they want to leave, will have a hard time figuring out how to completely delete their account.
My family seemed to like me being on Facebook, but they have other ways of contacting me.