Just thoughts

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Deleting the Facebook account

Yesterday I managed to delete my Facebook account. This isn't that interesting after all, but seemed to be the right move after all the ... whatever. I thought it will be an easy ride to delete the account but it actually has proven to be a minor headache due to the lack of information about how to actually do it. In my settings page I found a "Deactivate account" feature, but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted Facebook to leave me alone and my personal data, mostly because I love so much zucchini and his arrogant ignorance.

So, how to do it? You have to click a link which is buried I have no idea where. Even though I'm quite good in search, it took me at least 10 minutes to find it: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account. After clicking that link, you will be asked if you want to delete your account. Okay, yes. After you press "Okay", you're asked to provide your password and to test your eyesight with a Captcha challenge.


By the way. See that Captcha there? It's reCaptcha which is owned by Google and taking the challenge you actually help G digitalizing books while deleting your Facebook account. :)

I thought I was done, but no: Facebook reminded me that I will still have to wait 14 days in order to have my account deleted from their site (wondering if I can have my username back afterward). If by a mistake I login to Facebook during this period, my account will not be deleted. What does this mean? It means that I had to do the above described process again because I dared to "like" a Techcrunch article. Seems that even though I was logged out after deleting my account, a slippery cookie still remained active and logged me back in to Facebook. Nice try!

But what's my issue with Facebook? It's a hype. According to their press package they have 500 million active users. Mind if I don't believe that? Maybe if they'd drop the "active" adjective. I am skeptical because I saw what happened when I pressed that "Lick" button on TC. Ooops, typo: "like". Logged out users are magically logged back in if they press a like button and yes, that will appear on their wall, but that doesn't really mean they're active.
Secondly, Facebook is worth nothing for me. I find a site useful when I can learn something thanks to it. I follow blogs that publish comics; thanks to these blogs I improve my sense of humor. I use Twitter, because the people who I follow are really awesome and I become a better human barely by reading their congested thoughts (that sounds a bit 'yech'). I enjoy sites where users publish their images; my sense of beautiful is redefined each time I see a picture that was shot by someone who can appreciate what's beautiful or plain stunning, impressive.
In Facebook's case there's nothing to learn in my case. I'm flooded with information which has nothing to do with me, ads that are irrelevant for me and suggestions to become "friends" with people I don't find interesting at all. All this if I'm inside Facebook. If I am not... there's no valuable content.

Moreover, I haven't seen any technique on Facebook that would make me "wow" or at least would make me think about how it's done. In Twitter's case I always wonder how did they solve so neatly to push updates into my homepage, Google's Instant feature amazes me because it's so fast and I don't really get how could they make it so fast; even Bing makes me wonder sometimes about certain things they do. Facebook? Nothing at all.

So to summarize: Facebook is nothing more than a mammoth with high user base, a site that brings no innovation to the internet; they're stuck at where they were 3 or 4 years ago, both content and speed wise. It's an overrated rudimentary website, period.

Gary's off... with a trend

1 Comments:

Blogger methode said...

Back in January, 2010, Facebook had roughly 350 million users from which roughly 210 million were active in the past 30 days (!). If I do the math, that's 60% of the user base.

If I do the math again and say that 60% of the 500 million users were active in the past 30 days, I get 300 million active folks. I'm happy with that number; seems to be more acceptable.

Also, this year FB announced a lot of neat (yawn) "features" which attracted many sign-ups that boosted the user base. These folks signed up for one reason: to test a feature. After they did it, many of them abandoned their account (sheep effect), but they are still counted as active in the past 30 days.

November 28, 2010 at 4:07 AM  

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