Poll: Do you have a Facebook account?
I used to but I recently deleted my Facebook, LinkedIn and G+ accounts. Now I wonder how many other people are in my position.
I find an enormous amount of hostility on HN towards facebook, even going so far as a lot of people proudly mentioning that they will never touch it. I don't see why it gets such scorn, I think its a wonderful site.
Some notes on my usage, though:
All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear.
To a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical.
Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters. Facebook is not far off.
Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on.
If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or not), I can go on facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated.
I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page).
I could go on, but this is probably enough to give those who don't use it an idea of why I enjoy it so much.
Just go to the right background check company. They will have your birth date and much more.
It's amazing to think that some consider it private information.
* In the ordinary world, public <> searchable.
* People forget things. The Internet doesn't.
Maybe I'm taking this a little too literally but I find this statement disturbing.
How can someone not know that one of the biggest life events happened, one that takes 9 months at that, to a family member without being on facebook?
To me, facebook had the responsibility to handle the information you provide with care, but I believe that in their quest to become profitable, they've been quite cavalier with this notion, that is until now that viable alternatives are creeping up. I'm of the opinion that people love to know the truth, but they just don't like the lengthy process it sometimes requires to get at it, so they make judgment calls on the slightest bit of information, whether it's only a version of the truth or a partial truth. Politics is a prime example of a domain where this is usually exploited. I had an early taste of the destructive potential of facebook when I witnessed the scandal that ensued, when an acquaintance was tagged in a "compromising" photo. It was an admittedly amusing and entertaining event from my standpoint, but it prompted me to remove some of my personal information and some public pictures and set my email to warn me if someone tagged me in a picture or posted on my wall.
Then came facebook-connect, a private alternative to the public and more open OpenID. I know the latter was flawed in many ways. Call me paranoid, but I don't believe facebook was more motivated in unifying the authentication process than it was to know where its users went in the web. fb-connect imo, was an excellent trojan horse on their way to track users' habits across the web, but it wasn't perfect. Most websites still offered an alternative to people who didn't have a facebook account, to sign in with a more traditional sign-on. Also, having implemented fb-connect in the past, I distinctively remember that back then, it required the site's visitor to explicitly authorize this affiliation to take effect. Something that I've always refused to do in my effort to keep what belongs in facebook in facebook.
Then one day, after reading an article on techcrunch, I was about to post a comment and I saw the Comments box with my actual fb profile picture and name next to it. A website that I seldom visited, could now know that I was there, just because it was affiliated with facebook and I was still signed on to facebook during my visit. This new widget didn't even bother asking me if I was ok with that. That was when I started actively logging off of my fb (until then, I was just closing the window). Later on, some users started reporting that facebook actually kept tracking cookies across its affiliated sites even if they were logged off facebook. At that point, I started using a different browser just for it.
I don't understand people who don't understand why facebook get such a scorn. I like my family and my friends and I like keeping in touch with them. Just because I happen to do it with facebook doesn't mean I have to become a fan by association.
(I work at Facebook.)
I used it diligently for about a year to give it a fair trial. I actually liked it until I saw the illusion. I promptly deleted it when I'd had enough.
I found the mediated social experience wasn't adding any value to my life. A lot of friends I had spent a lot of time and energy in building friendships with became casual observers in the stream of events. Instead of being personally invited out with the gang I found that I was just filtering my feed for events and filtering for the ones I would be interested in. I would just get invited to everything because facebook makes it so easy to spam your network. I didn't have to talk to anyone. It was ironically anonymous and passive.
It just didn't work for me. I'm an introvert. I invest a lot of emotional energy in my relationships. I have few friends and I like to shower them with my attention and care. Facebook opened up a lot of opportunities to meet new people and attend parties I would have otherwise never been invited to, but I don't put a lot of value in such things. I'd rather focus on the people that mean a lot to me than to be buzzing about from one event to another and just watching life pass by on a web page.
I'm also of the mind that there are really very few things in life that matter. If some person I barely know in my family just had a kid I wouldn't really care. It never mattered before facebook and it still doesn't matter now. It's just mental noise. I like to take time to reflect and absorb things... too much information just keeps me busy with unimportant things.
The only annoyance I have is the variety of sites I was using FBConnect with (it IS convenient) that I have to re-register. But that goes to show you the problem of relying on tools like Facebook for site logins.
edit: I deleted my account three years ago because it annoyed me and I rarely found myself using it. If that wasn't the case, I'm not sure if by now I would have decided to delete it for other reasons (e.g. privacy) - I haven't really stopped to think about it.
I'm happy with this compromise, right now. I no longer have any addiction, but I don't feel too out of the loop. And I feel in control of the data I give to facebook.
Logging on is like flicking quickly past a TV channel that is aimed those who watch reality tv. No thanks.
Had Google+, deleted it when my name started showing up in search results. I just don't like the way they're trying to work it into every other thing you do with them ... without your clear permission.
Like you, I had but then deleted my facebook account; however, a professor of my grad school class requires one, so I created a temporary account.
My facebook account exists solely as a placeholder.
The people I want to stay in touch with, I stay in touch with. Those I don't, I don't.
It really is that simple. You don't need facebook, or anything else, to stay in touch with the people who are important to you.
I call shenanigans on anyone who thinks facebook is a required part of life. Or Twitter. Or any other "social network" for that matter.
If you use it and enjoy it, that's great for you. Keep using it, keep enjoying it.
I'll stick to emails, phonecalls, IMs, and text messages. Hasn't failed me yet.
I find Twitter both entertaining and useful and a little LinkedIn is helpful to keep up with old coworkers and such.
Those shenanigans finally stopped, but then I'd be browsing the web and find comments like 'Your friend x likes this page.' It's creepy that to see that on a site I've never visited before when I have my FB locked down completely. I understand the technology, but the instinctive reaction is still 'How the hell do you know who my friends are, random website?'
I haven't noticed that lately (desensitized to it?), but I just noticed on a friend's public-facing FB page (I logged out to verify that it was totally public) that it said she was in Country Y, city Z on date D, with ME. There was my full name and my location in the world posted to the world, despite locking down EVERY SINGLE privacy setting available and allowing NO third party applications, etc. Even my friends cannot see or post to my 'wall.' This is all very disturbing, so yes, I'm still hatin', despite recognizing the cool benefits of a single centralized place to stay in touch.
This has nothing to do with whether or not you have a Facebook account, but rather is based on the behavior of your friends.
Certainly not a bad company to invest in, regardless of perceived value.
Apple gave us the iPhone, which makes consumers happy, but now I gotta create an iPhone and iPad app in addition to a web app! I want the days back when all we had to do was create a simple website!
Here we are, almost 3 years later, I have this mostly inactive account, with around 100 contact, most of them being people from my old high school or college.
I think I never get myself to use it because, despite the wealth of info it presents, it doesn't give me a practical way to use the data (REST anyone?).
I recently heard of the Graph API, so now I'm curious and excited again :)
I'd be fine with them if they didn't broadcast my every move and everyone I know, but even then I wouldn't use them; I just don't see any point to them. If I want to know how someone's doing I'll contact them on Skype or by phone or just go visit.
Have I missed out on anything by not being on Facebook? Nope.
Social networking has evolved to become a useful part of my life that I don't want to live without. But the evolution of it's usefulness in relation to me is diverging from the evolution of Facebook and Google+.
(I work at Facebook, but I'm mostly just asking for my own interest.)
But don't tell me, now everything is much better. That is what all software people say about the last release, isn't it? Just get it right from the beginning.
It was a good decision, though. Everybody should check t&c before signing something. That sheds a clear light on who is really evil and who is not.
At some point I thought I was being pretty cool for opting out, but now I realize it just isn't a product for me. There is not a lot intrinsically wrong with it; a lot of people seem to like it very much.
are you seriously saying that the language they use has anything to do with you not using it?
I find Linkedin to be of value. I have never had an account on the book and never will.
Many connection requests are recruiters over here, too. I ignore those.
[1] http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/linkedins-soc...
If you are worried about your activities being tracked and sold, stop using your credit cards. Have you read the privacy policy on those lately?
All this anti-Facebook pride strikes me as bitterness. Everyone has a right to do what they want, but would be all the wiser to look at themselves to understand why.
Facebook gives me more than I give Facebook - a lot more. When that stops being true, I'll stop using it. I too am kicking myself for not building a social network in 1996 - I'm not going to convince myself Facebook is evil because I didn't.
From my point of view, most people are on FB, some are on Twitter, and almost nobody is on G+.
There's another reason I ditched Facebook, though. I found that my life was getting too entangled with other people. I had a lot of friends in the past who worked or still work for the US govt. and my current views on that government (that it is corrupt to the core and needs to be rebooted) were making them afraid for their jobs. Simply unfriending me is not enough, because Facebook has a memory...so I sent everyone my email and Twitter ID and went through the 2-week-long process of deleting my Facebook account.
What scares the hell out of me is that Facebook is concentrating so much personal knowledge in one place -- one-stop shopping for corrupt governments!
The proper approach is to federate the social networks together, so people can move from Facebook to Twitter to G+ to LinkedIn effortlessly but retain control of their data and hence put up a sizable barrier to corruption.
But I'm not about to alienate myself from the people I love in order to do so. So I stay in FB and only put stuff on there that can be put in the front page of the newspaper. I do not mind not having privacy because I go in with no expectation of privacy at all.
I won't delete it because it's fun.
One thing I worry about online is someone misinterpreting what I share. For example, I share a lot of hacker related news.
I am really interested in reasons why not to have one or delete it entirely.
Why do you guys choose to not have one, go by a different name, or delete your facebook?
Personally, it just feels creepy having a facebook and that's why I have one under a different name. Not that you couldn't figure it out anyway but it gives me a sense of security.