the social website cull
With all the building noise about Facebook and their plans to monetise everyone’s information and connections by progressive privacy invasion I finally decided to delete my profile for good. With some regret, I’ve now even deleted the page I set up for Kakarapiti, though in truth Twitter is a better place for a bird anyway.
In doing this though I started to wonder whether each of the other sites I’m signed up for actually deliver worth to me in excess of the information I’m trading away to them. A thought which lead to a wholesale purge:
- blip.fm
- bookarmy.com
- boozemonkey.com.au
- boxee.com
- brizzly.com
- delicious.com
- dopplr.com (I have to say – I love these guys, it’s just I have no use for their service. They’re so classy they sent me a copy of the data I had entered into their system, such as it was. I wish all social networking sites were like this.)
- facebook.com
- friendfeed.com
- goodreads.com
- hunch.com
- last.fm
- orkut.com
- rudder.com
- secondlife.com
And then there was the services I couldn’t figure out how to delete
- bloglines.com
- grabawine.co.nz
- iscrybe.com
- rummble.com
And some I hadn’t visited for so long they died in the interim:
- dreamledger.com
- engagd.com
- gleamd.com
- iyomu.com
- muxtape.com
As well as the inevitable sites I couldn’t get into to delete my account (must have another go at it):
- odeo.com
- pmog.com
You know what? That feels a whole heap better. I think this sort of review is something that might need repeated on a six-monthly basis…
Julian
13 May 2010, 07:43 #
Wow cold turkey. Got the shivers yet?
Alan
13 May 2010, 08:56 #
No. It’s been a week since I ditched Facebook, and I’ve not regretted it at all.
Mind you, I wasn’t using it much anyway, and secondly, no-one was using it much to communicate with me.
I figure if anyone wants to get hold of me I’m only a Google search away. Since my internet nemesis scaled down his web presence I seem to have regained the top spot in searches for “Alan Macdougall”. (And I’m no longer the top result for vanity surfing anymore either, thank goodness.)
che tibby
14 May 2010, 08:01 #
sooo… you thinking that social media might have jumped the shark? i’m getting FB friend requests from weird bogans i haven’t known in 20 years.
which suggests, “well and truly”
Alan
14 May 2010, 09:32 #
I don’t think it’s jumped the shark – just that it’s time to carefully consider what benefits each site brings compared to what you give up by joining.
I’m OK with self-disclosure on the internet so long as I’m in control of it. And in the case of Facebook, I was no longer in control.
Mike Riversdale
14 May 2010, 11:06 #
That is indeed very cool of Dopplr and I agree, I wish more sites (“social” or not) would do the same.
che tibby
14 May 2010, 12:29 #
still thinking it over, but am likely to also do same on FB.
Mary
20 May 2010, 21:26 #
Ooo Alan, you are an early non-adopter! :-) http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/3720215/Is-a-Facebook-exodus-on-the-cards
Brian
20 May 2010, 22:19 #
Re facebook I decided on a compromise position of stripping out all my personal information (birthday, address, interests etc) and staying registered. I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing that I post to facebook that I wouldn’t post on twitter, or write on the back of a postcard for that matter.