| I deleted mine a few days ago. Hopefully I'll make it through the 14-days where I can re-activate. ## My Facebook Rants: * __Friends__ - A social network should just sense the people you're interested in and give updates accordingly. This would do away with your creepy co-worker demanding that you be his/her "friend." You wouldn't have to delete, and offend, that kid that you never spoke to in the 5th grade. In fact, Facebook kind of requires that its users adopt a kind of 5th grade mentality towards social interaction. "Will you be my girlfriend?" OkCupid gets this part right. You can add people as friends but updates from people you've recently stalked show up in your feed automatically. If OkCupid wasn't a dating-oriented site, it wouldn't make a bad social networking site. * __The e-mails__ - I block Facebook emails on gmail. There really should be a way to opt-out of this. It's annoying. * __Tagging__ - This seemed neat at first and was what probably made Facebook popular in the Facebook but it was a mistake. When I had Facebook, I just blocked anyone from seeing pictures I was tagged in. If I went to a party or something; I would avoid cameras because I didn't want to have to worry about a picture of me drinking and playing dice in an alley to show up on my wall. * __Vendor Lock-In__ - You can't download your own profile pictures, status updates, etc without the use of some ephemeral 3rd party tool that probably won't exist for very long. * __The 14-day re-activation period__ - I quit smoking after 6 years; it was easier. (Just pretend that HN supports markdown :) |
Friends: If you reject someone from being your friend they are not informed about it but, if they are smart enough, they can check your profile page and see if they can add you again; you can also block that person and he won't be able to ask to be your friend again; I think this is almost perfect, the only problem I see here is the word "friend". You can accept someone and add that person to a list which will make that person unable to see anything if you want to while still being "friends". Oh, you can also just forget about accepting friendships you don't want to have, the person asking for it will know you still didn't accept him but that's about it.
Emails: You can disable all email notifications (or toggle most of them off leaving the most important on, it's really well done) going to "My Account", "Notifications" tab.
Tagging: You can make your default friends' settings restrict things like seeing photos. If you want some of them to see those photos you can add them to a list where you let them see photos.
Vender Lock-In: I'm not sure about this but didn't Open Social just solve this problem?