Has anyone here made a graceful Facebook exit? What did you do? What did you wish you had done?
1. Stop posting any content yourself. Stop using/playing all apps/games. If you need to contact someone, do it via phone, email, or some other non-Facebook medium. Disable Facebook chat so they can't message you on there, and reply to their messages/wall posts in person or over the phone (replying with another internet-based medium might raise some red flags, but using an entirely different form of communication won't).
2. Delete content you've posted in the past. Remove apps/games you have installed and remove yourself from the groups you're in. Remove information from your profile. Untag yourself from pictures others have posted.
3. Delete friends that you haven't talked to in a long time.
4. Contact your remaining friends and give them your contact info.
5. Delete your account.
So I just told them all I was leaving, deleted every post and picture, and removed every friend-link.
It isn't really that hard.
What happened was that people removed all identifying information from their profiles and changed their names to something that was not recognizable for anyone to search (i.e., either you had them already in the contact list, or you couldn't find their profile without asking them).
AFAIK, Facebook wants you to have your real name on your profile (as per TOS), but a friend with a stalker problem didn't have any problem to get it set to something non-namelike.
IMO, a combination of a non-searchable name and restricted privacy settings for things like "who can tag you in pictures" and "who can see my posts" should solve the bulk of the issue.
Extra points for blocking third-party inclusion of facebook.com scripts or images in your ad blocker (which also blocks the "sign in via facebook" javascript code, like-buttons etc. - these are probably the biggest privacy issues outside facebook itself).
Ultimately those are the feelings I'm trying to rid myself of, but there are pros to having it around. After a month off, I barely cared to login, but I'm glad it still exists for the random PM or funny news feed. I'm back to checking it every couple of days and I'm happy I didn't delete all my friends, etc.
Your experience may vary though, I doubt most people noticed I was gone.
What was your name again?
Honestly if you are a serious business man you don't have time for facebook.
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zucke...
Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he's writing for dramatic effect, not truth. Don't let the film factor in to your escape.
The UConnect guys were led on for two months. Then they see Zuckerberg release thefacebook.com with the main feature they had - exclusivity because of college. I don't see how that doesn't warrant something in the range of 1% of Facebook. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think any of the UConnect guys would've done anything with UConnect on their own, but in these circumstances they do seem to deserve the settlement.
In short, if you really want to leave, just do it. Don't bother with being graceful; no one will notice or care for more than a minute.
Seriously? I have in the ballpark of 180 friends on Facebook, and maybe a dozen of those are people I haven't met in person. The vast majority are either friends from real life or people from my social circle I interact with occasionally anyway. Then again, I've always treated Facebook as a fairly personal medium, and I don't friend people I don't know or don't like.
I mean, yeah, if you treat Facebook friends like pokemon, it's not going to have a lot of value for you, but if you abuse any social tool, it's not going to have a lot of value for you.
Earlier today, I found out that an old friend of mine that I grew up with is going to be in town in a couple of weeks and made plans to grab lunch while he's here. I haven't seen him in 7 or 8 years. Things like that are incredibly cool to me, and the entire reason I use social networking sites. They facilitate me interacting with people I care about; they're not a substitution for actual interaction, but they make it possible in the first place.
I hear people talking about leaving facebook entirely and that seems a bit short-sighted and draconian in measure. Little do I hear discussed changing the way that we use Facebook.
Last month, I went from 250+ friends to 40. Instead of using Facebook as a mean to accumulate every acquaintance I've ever made, I decided to only keep the friends to which I am close and comfortable sharing parts of my life. I changed most of my privacy settings to the most restrictive possible.
Yes, Facebook may change its privacy settings again. If the privacy becomes such an issue to warrant me leaving, I will leave. However, keeping up with the privacy changes and settings is a price I am willing to pay. Facebook is not free.
Being an entrepreneur, I do want an easy way to announce things I do. I want a way to keep in touch with those closest to me. That number of people is 40 right now, and still seems a bit high. Still, since I have cut most of my friends I have found myself more open and willing to use Facebook.
For me, Facebook is a giant phone book. It is a way to look people up and for people to find you. I like it for that, beyond that - email me.
i.e. the rumored facebook phone
post "i'm deleting my facebook account"
deactivate your account
stop using it for 14 days
you're gone.
To get notified of interesting things happening, I subscribe to Facebook RSS feeds. JWZ made a listing of some of them here: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1144527.html About the only thing it doesn't include is photo updates.
With this setup, I visit Facebook perhaps once a week.
In my experience it's not that hard to get out of Facebook - the friends who do want to find you will either Google for you or ask people they know are your friends for contact information. And that's for the really urgent stuff. Just make sure you have a Google-able presence (maybe a Google profile?), an email that's easy to find and you're good to go.
Good luck with the move! :)
As for your "Facebook Friends", remove all of your content, lock down your privacy settings, and leave a note on your profile page that says the account is no longer being used. That way, when people find you on Facebook they will know what's going on.
Real friends will contact you anyway. You might miss a few stupid pictures or something, but you can spent your time with more useful things anyway. It is no big deal, delete your account and forget about it. One time sucker less. It is really no big deal!
That said, you can keep an account without ever visiting the site, for those not-that-close friends.
to the point of still being findable, use http://about.me or http://extendr.com/ to avoid disappearing.
and strangely enough, the SERP for "matt albiniak" on DDG has twitter first, linkedin second, and facebook third.
If you no longer want to be in the lives of your high school friends or vice versa, even online, cut the cord. You'll find that people are usually apathetic and none the wiser.
* It's boring.
* It's a waste of time.
* I don't trust it.
For many years I was north of FB's average of 55 minutes per user per day on the site. Several months ago I stopped reading the news feed, and that more than anything else has helped me keep my usage under 2 minutes per day.
I don't regret effectively deactivating my account, and like others have noted, I doubt anyone noticed I'm gone. My main reason for joining in the first place was basic social planning -- today, I still think their photo and event apps are very well executed and among the most valuable parts of the site. There's just too much baggage that comes with their use.
However, Facebook still has huge residual utility value even if I'm not actively using it. Friends use it to get in touch sometimes. Occasionally I receive a message from someone I care about who doesn't have my email anymore for some reason.
I wouldn't delete my Facebook account if you gave me £100 to do so, even though I'm not actively using it - for the same reason I don't delete my LinkedIn account.
If it's no longer cool because everyone goes there, then how do I remain cool? First by making sure everyone knows I don't go there anymore,. "Facebook is so last year." If I was through being cool, then I could just stop going there and not make a statement about it.
Facebook won't actually close your account, though. That's the hard part. You have to go thru and delete all your information manually. IF you look on your feed / wall, you can see everything you've done, and you can go and click on it, and delete it. It is a long slow tedious process, and it takes me about 2 hours to do a year.
The normal "cancel my facebook account" procedure that facebook does is to just suspend your account. IT is all there and if you ever log in again, it comes right back. While it is suspended you won't show up on your friends lists, etc, but all your activity is still there.
This makes it really easy & tempting--in the days where just about every webpage has a facebook like button that if you accidentally press will cause you to see the facebook login screen-- to bring your account back.
I went around and around with them over a year ago about this, and their policy is that there is no such thing as "canceling" a facebook account. They keep it ready and waiting for you "for when you want to come back." Thus they will only allow you to "suspend" it. (this policy may have changed given all the high profile facebook quitting in the last year.)
I'm deleting all of the info, when that is done, I'm going to change the real name on the account to asdsrqwer sadfvcawer and then the password to something random and then "Suspend it".
Also, that removes the temptation/ or means to go back to your old profile for which you will manually have to re-add all your friends.
In the last few months, Facebook has amended their help pages to be more clear that there is also a permanent delete option. It suspends your account for 30 days, then purges it. I used this, and as promised I could no longer log in after the 30 days were up. The comments I had left on others' posts were removed, and photos I was tagged in had the tags dropped.
While I then perma-deleted my account (at least I hope so), I assume they still have all my data, and that it's probably leaking out to anyone who knows where to look.