Dear Everybody,

No, I haven’t unfriended you on Facebook. Well, kind of. If you are offended by the concept, then go away. To everybody still in the room, let me clarify…

You haven’t been unfriended. Instead, I’ve simply “broken the habit”—I have deleted my Facebook profile.

Why?

Facebook provides (mostly) trivialities that sponge up time, and in exchange, takes both the information you give it and the information it can datamine from you and your friend list, sells this information to advertisers, and gives you targeted ads.

Mostly I just used the site to “poke” people. A few times I used it to investigate people of interest. Once I have used it to check the time of a party. Sometimes, I would waste time getting lost in the endless stream of status updates, photos, personality quizzes and application spam—and while the occasional photos some of you posted are probably the part of Facebook I will miss the most—really, I don’t give enough of a flying fuck about your virtual farm/virtual pirate ship/virtual mafia wars/virtual penis to care. A simple cost-benefit approach therefore led me to the belief that it just wasn’t worth the time anymore.

If you want to contact me, you probably have a more reliable way of doing it than with Facebook, so from now on do it that way. If you don’t, a comment on this blog will probably end up in my email. If you want me to read your status updates, get me to follow you on Twitter. If you have interesting photos you want me to see…hmm, well, either you will hopefully be using some other, better, photo-sharing service; or you would show me prints.

Thankyou.