A couple of years back, I was at a dinner with some colleagues, they were talking up the advantages of having a Facebook account. According to them, it was a cool new way to keep in touch, make business contacts, have an Internet presence and so on. In the months that followed, I would receive an email every now and again saying that ‘Joe’ wants to invite me to be his friend on Facebook or ‘Susan’ wants to invite me to be her friend on Facebook.

I fell for the it and went hook line and sinker to Facebook and duly set up my account. I spent some time playing around with the Facebook interface, searching out other people that I knew and basically trying to get to grips with it. I found it a bit minimalist and counter intuitive. I invited one or two people to be my friends and responded in the positive to a couple of invitations myself. I then abandoned it for a few months until one day when I received some comments on my Facebook from an old acquaintance. This person had their own Facebook account and had found me using the FB network. That’s all very well but the person in question was someone I did not want to hear from. I decided that my only way out was to get off the FB radar altogether.  Easy peazy right ?  Wrong!

Firstly there is no user option to delete your own account from Facebook, you have to contact the Facebook people via email and ask them to delete your account. Their initial response is to ask why you want to leave. Your answer has to have a pretty strong justification about it as far as I could see, it’s a bit akin to applying for an annulment. They don’t grant them to just anybody you know. Next; after you’ve lied to them about your reasons for wanting to leave their cult you are then told that before they can delete your account, you need to log in and delete all data on your account. This can be a mammoth task, you have to delete every contact, comment, friend,  message etc etc and you can only achieve this by deleting the various items one by one, there is no mass way of say deleting all comments. Finally you have to go back to the Facebook police and beg them nicely to delete your account. Unless you’ve done everything perfectly and exactly as per their instructions, they will respond with a ‘no can do’. After about a week of email tennis with them, I finally managed to get an email from them telling me that my account was now deleted. It’s an email that I treasure and consider it to be somewhat of an achievement.

Bebo, Myspace ??? These really are for kids. Granted I can see the attraction of these tools to kids and teenagers. When I was a teen (just a few short years ago ahem) I would have loved a facility like Myspace. What a great way to show off how many friends you have or to meet girls without having to actually go through the terrifying act of physically meeting girls. You could lie about yourself, make yourself ultra cool, impose your musical tastes on your page visitors and even blog. ke ke ke ke cool.  But as I say – for kids.

Then there’s the Twitter thing. I just don’t get this, it’s almost akin to a personal gps tracking device.  “Keep your friends up to date with what you are currently up to” . . . . . . . . . in God’s name WHY?  Not to mention Linkedin et al. They are like mini social networks where people post about what they are doing right now in order that their friends can see and keep track of them. Again I ask . . . WHY?  In gods name Why ? Look life is short enough believe me without all of us building information mountains out of useless trivia. Or is it useless? Is it perhaps useful to some ?

As I read more and more articles about the mass of data that is being built up by these online tools, I am usually left feeling uneasy and almost part of a George Orwell novel. I remember a few years back having a brief encounter with Myspace (oh alright I admit it). I actually had a Myspace account there for awhile but in my defence, it  was a great way to keep up with all my friends in Alaska (yeah right – ed). I remember during that time, the amount of spam that ended up in my email inbox and in my Myspace messages became unmanageable. Luckily it was a temporary email that I had setup solely for the whole Myspace experience so I was able to just abandon it. Turns out, the best way for me to keep up with my friends from Alaska was to simply email, phone and write to them (yes write to them, can you imagine that).
I don’t think I want to be part of an information mountain. I don’t want marketeers to be able to process me as part of a bigger demographic picture. I would much sooner have control of my own fate, be i control of my own information, write my own story and carve my own path through cyber space. I think an online presence is a very useful thing. It’s great to be online, to be able to put your own content on the web, to share with others, give opinion, communicate with friends, business colleagues, family etc.

All you need is a blog folks, and they are free (in every sense)