That is quite possibly the least effective means of protest I can imagine.
I can imagine less effective scenarios. 1) Not changing your life at all. 2) Not touching your Facebook page again. 3) Dressing up in a chicken suit and dancing around a major intersection. etc.
If you delete your Facebook page, it's one less user that Facebook can claim to have; if enough people do it, it could put a dent (however minor) in their bottom line.
As people (and I) have said over and over, don't put anything on the net that you don't want to be public.
Well, I haven't put my mother's maiden name up. But the more information about me that's up, the more connections are possible, until someone derives my mother's maiden name (or some other security question). Remember, we don't always get to choose a security question, that's relatively new. Banks, credit agencies, phone company, someone has something about you that's derivable.
Like I said, I don't care if FB changes or not, that's not necessary for me to want to leave, or at least diminish my presence.
And you are not a mass, you are one person. And if your friends are anything like mine, you are not going to convince them to leave. Most people are happy to give up a little privacy, for the ease of keeping in touch with their friends that FB offers.
FB has a critical mass, so it is not as easy as suggesting an alternative.
Sure, convincing a group of people to delete their Facebook accounts is better than just deleting your own, but discouraging people en masse from enacting simple changes also discourages emergent behaviours in the crowd before they even start.
Focusing on and performing little actions distracts from doing the the big things that actually make a noticeable difference.
How To Delete Your Facebook Account: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703
Believe it or not, there is a social web beyond Facebook.
Well, actually, as Lauren Weinstein pointed out, the political reaction to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's attitude towards privacy and the usual likely overreaction might hurt all Web 2.0 players, good and bad:
"He appears to be unapologetically reveling in taking advantage of many Facebook users' naivete about privacy risks, and shows no signs of backing down."
http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg03450.html
So I do have a greater stake in this, but there's not a whole lot that I see that I can do. That won't be true for others of course.
I think it would read something like "The value of a communications network decreases with the square of the amount of people that have left it".
It makes the exceedingly questionable assumption that we value all possible connections equally. Many different approaches to quantifying the value of networks converge on the much more reasonable estimate that value tends towards n log(n) rather than n*n.
See http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is... for more.
I think everybody realizes that Metcalfe's law is not a 'law' in the sense that it is a given or an absolute, any of those - including Moores law and others like it are to be taken with a grain of salt.
The practical upshot of all this is that if the value of a network goes up with a non-linear factor when the number of participants increases the reverse also holds true. What we call it doesn't really matter and Metcalfe's law will do as good as any other shorthand description that will convey the point.
Thanks for the interesting read by the way, it's nice to see that even if Metcalfe was maybe wrong in the 'absolute' in principle the concept of non-linear value increase seems to hold true.
In an interesting twist, Metcalfe's law comes closest to being true in mediums where existing social relations are less important. For instance eBay is a classic example. If I want to sell, I really do value the network at the size of said network because I have no idea who wants to buy from me. Which is one reason why it is so hard to compete with eBay. (Despite how badly they mess up.)
So, if I understand your piece correctly the value of the power changes over time depending on the size of the network and the available pool, in other words even the log(n) factor is not exact, in the beginning it is probably closer the to the original n^2, whereas later on it moves to more sedate territory, but it always seems to be higher than the '1' added by attaching another node to the network.
The 'competing with ebay' has a nice counterpart. In the netherlands there was a small local site called 'marktplaats' that had entrenched itself in the early days of the web, and nothing ebay did to dislodge it worked, so they ended up buying it.
The kicker is that 'hyves' (the dutch counterpart to facebook) is losing ground because people have a lot of international connections to friends and family, but trade seems to be limited to geographic boundaries and hence marktplaats succeeded where hyves is in trouble.
In the piece I quoted, it isn't that value scales like nn then like n log(n). The argument is that value scales like n log(n), which for small n looks more like nn than it does for large n. That said the argument given implicitly assumes that most of the people in the network have most of the people they really care about in the network as well. This assumption is less likely to be true for small networks than large ones.
It didn't make it into the paper, but an interesting optical illusion was discussed while we were writing it. Most of us judge the ubiquity of a network according to how many people we personally know who use it. Therefore people's value from belonging to a network tends to scale linearly with the size they perceive that network as having. (A typical American neither perceives nor values the growth of that network in China.) Which means that each individual observes what Bob Metcalfe did when he came up with his rule of thumb. We found that interesting, but left it out of the paper.
Another discussion we had was on different networks that scale differently. The two extremes we came up with are the telegraph networks and eBay. In the case of the telegraph network there is an asymmetry between senders and receivers. It is easy to make every resident of a major US city a potential receiver, at which point the network value scales linearly with the number of senders. And at the opposite end, auctions scale in a less approximately linear fashion. However we decided against including that because we didn't have detailed enough data to support our preliminary conclusions.
Also you should note that the IEE Spectrum article is an abridged form of http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf. The full version offers several different lines of reasoning that all converge on n log(n) scaling rules.