Why I haven't been on Facebook

Facebook has made me angry, and I don't have to put up with stuff that makes me angry.  So I'm putting it in Time Out for an indeterminate amount of time.

I was already becoming less happy with their website.  The ads were becoming more and more intrusive and ... blinky.  I found out that some of my friends' status updates weren't showing up in my news feed, in spite of the fact that I had never told Facebook to filter those friends' updates.

Then I went away from the internet for a week.  When I came back, there were about five messages in a row in my inbox from Facebook, telling me that I sure was missing out by not logging in.  Five in a row.  They were mailing me the same spam message every single day.  So I immediately logged in and changed my settings to never get that kind of message again.

And then I posted a cute little comment on Facebook, while I was there.  We were returning from a road trip, and I joked that somewhere outside of a small town in Idaho, we put away the ipad and traveled like the pioneers did:  playing the alphabet game with billboards on the side of the road.

And then I posted the comment and nothing happened.  Nothing.  So I tried to post it again, and I was asked, "Do you really want to post this twice?"  So I asked Tim if he had seen my comment.  And he hadn't.  So I went to my profile page and looked up the comment, and sure enough, there it was hidden on my personal space.  But Facebook had decided not to put it on anyone's news feed.  Not even my own.

"Want to change this?" asked Facebook.  "You can flag this post as important."

But it wasn't important.  It was just cute.  And I was annoyed that Facebook had arbitrarily decided that the first thing I had posted in about a month was just not really worth sharing with my friends.  Then I asked the screen, What Is The Point?  I thought Facebook was a way for me and my friends to share stuff, like cute little status updates.

But as I kept hitting reload, trying to see my own status update, and as I kept getting flashing new ads instead, I remembered the real point.

Selling stuff.  Selling me stuff.  And selling me to other stuff.  And when the selling becomes more visible than me, I'm out.

And I haven't been back.

I decided I was not going to delete my account.  I was just going to let it sit there and maybe glance at it every now and then after a month or so -- long enough for my web browser to forget that I ever used to go there.  

But today, I received two new messages in my email inbox from Facebook.  Even though I told it never to send me messages reminding me to log in, it has decided to send me selected items from my news feed anyway.  Like the fact that Tim has uploaded photos, and the fact that a professor friend of mine recommends an article.  Grrr....

This may be the real end.  The final end.  The sad, bitter end.

Alas.  This means if you want to tell me about the cute stuff happening in your life from now on, you may just have to do it the way the pioneers did: send me an email.  Sorry guys.