Withdrawing from Facebook. Gently.

For some time now FB has been cheesing me off. Big time. They keep changing the look. They add in features I don't want and can't turn off. They remove features I had got used to.

I get strange invitations to weird games that I don't play. I get 'friended' by people I have no clue to. A friend's FB account got hacked. I read about features like Timeline that resurrect the dead past uninvited. And it doesn't get activated on my account. Dunno whether to rejoice or mourn.

If I comment on someone's pic I get inundated with everyone else's comments on it. It's like being at a wedding reception and having to listen to each guest wishing the couple. Gets old fast.

And may be that's what it is. I'm getting too old for this social media claptrap. Perhaps.

Or perhaps it's just FB that's stepping on my bunions. Besides, FB makes me lazy. Post a picture. Browse through some pictures of people who are only marginally relevant (at best) to my life. Read inane comments by all and sundry. Too passive by far.

So here's my resolve for 2012. Wean off FB. But breaking a habit, even one as sporadic as my FB habit is, is not easy. So, baby steps.

Step 1 - turn off notifications from FB on my mobile devices. Check. (Do I really need to know that someone somewhere commented something on someone else's photo of somebody altogether different sometime in the last two minutes? No.)

Step 2 - turn off email notifications. I will have to dive into FB's innards to achieve this and not altogether sure I want to do that. Will probably be simpler to set a filter in GMail to treat these as spam. 

Step 3 - Stop visiting FB in my browser or my mobile apps. Check. I hardly ever do that nowadays anyway unless prompted by a notification. And see steps 1 and 2 on how to fix those.

Step 4 - Start blogging again. Haven't done so in a long, long while. And blogs are so last decade. But what the heck.

Finally, one day, delete my FB account. May, just may, come to pass.

Ironically, my blog posts will be posted to FB. For all those FB fanbois.

Posted via email from the blog posterous