A week without Facebook
30 Dec 2012A week ago today I deactivated my Facebook account. It was something I’ve been considering since a friend mentioned recently how frustrated he gets when he get’s invited to events over Facebook and how noone calls or texts him anymore, and I feel the same. I just don’t feel “social” on Facebook. I get far more digital interaction with friends on Twitter, and that has been the case for a while.
So a week later how am I finding it? Day to day I don’t feel like I’m missing either the site or I’m out of contact with people. I removed the apps from my iPhone so I don’t get any notifications; the apps were actually hidden anyway in a folder called “Social” on the springboard, whereas Tweetbot has always been one of the 4 blessed apps on the dock which shows where my priorities really are anyway.
When I’m at my laptop though it’s much harder - I catch myself starting to type “cmd + t” followed by “f a” in Chrome. Frustratingly it’s actually quite difficult to completely remove all mention of a site from your history in Chrome. In Firefox there is an option to remove all visits by domain but I had to manually do this myself by editing the history file under ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default with a SQLite editor.
Another frustration is when I discover new websites that require me to sign-in via Facebook. In part I feel that maybe I should just setup a dummy Facebook account so I can use these sites but then when I think about it I don’t really care enough about these sites anyway to bother interacting with them in a personalised manner.
So do I feel better being Facebook free? Yeah I guess so, I’ve certainly texted people a lot more to see if they’ve had a pleasant Christmas rather than just observing their Facebook status’ that say they’ve had a good one.
Here’s to a Facebook free 2013. Happy new year!