[imperator]

I just canceled my Facebook account today, after thinking about it for some time, and specifically in reaction to recent events. The type of decline illustrated in this timeline is reason number one. From my point of view, Facebook is no longer enhancing my life activities, and now on its way to hindering it.

The various reactions to canceling my account were interesting. Some people seemed almost angry. Some just wanted to make sure to get my email.

[robryan]

I'd expect that facebook would be prepared to lose some well informed and privacy conscious techies in the decisions they have made. The general public consensus seems to be that they either don't care about privacy or don't care enough at this stage to outweigh the benefits of using the social network all their friends are on.

I don't mind personally, my account is all public and I never post anything that I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone seeing. I guess I mainly use it to see what others are up to and posting and engage that more than I put my whole life on there.

[pierrefar]

Informed techies are a powerful force. Look what we did with Firefox: we recommended it to everyone and it worked. We are asked which antivirus to use. We are asked how to do X or if we know of a program to do Y. When we speak, the mainstream eventually follows.

[robryan]

That is true, the network effects make it a more complicated equation though, using Firefox didn't mean that you can no longer use certain aspects of the web. I guess it has to do with a critical mass of people, first enough trying your product that it's visible that facebook is no longer the one stop shop for all your friends data (I guess this is what Twitter is, although it's not so much a general purpose social network). Then eventually you need to get to the point where enough users are on board to make it a better use of a persons time to communicate through the new network without losing to much value.

Once you hit this point there is no coming back as has been shown with myspace. I guess a parallel could be drawn with IE - FF there, once a user has been converted to FF and decide it is better IE faces a monumental task to get them back, something they may never achieve, always appearing to be one step behind with a heap of non standards syntax for good measure.

[pierrefar]

I deactivated my account for exactly the same reasons as you. No one has missed me yet, so I'll be completely closing it soon.

[ytilibitapmoc]

I am also in the process of canceling my Facebook account. But I am doing so in a way which will (hopefully) educate my Facebook friends on the "Why?" part (i.e., posting links to relevant web-pages).

We are not going to achieve critical mass simply by walking away ourselves.