Flutterby™! : person who was my impetus for first 2011-03-10 20:36:16.275119+00

person who was my impetus for first

2011-03-10 20:36:16.275119+00 by Dan Lyke 13 comments

The person who was my impetus for first using Facebook has just announced that she's quitting it. I'm seeing various threads about using plug-ins to disable Facebook's cross-site capabilities because of unintended "like"s. I'm deliberately not "Friend"ing people I read in other venues because don't want to be overwhelmed by duplicate updates and conversations. I suspect we're seeing peak Facebook.

I have a whole group of "friends" in Facebook who are really my wife's friends. These friends of hers insist of communicating (messgages, photos, etc) to her via Facebook but she doesn't have an account. So I would be abandoning some of her friends by walking away.

I am thinking of turning down some of the settings. And it would be nice to have a Facebook autoresponder (hmmm.... There's another idea that I have no time to implement...).

I think Sara was just planning on walking away from it, but one of the geniuses of Facebook (and the evil genius of Zynga) is the way it socially guilts people into participating. So, yeah, people feel like they're abandoning friends if they walk away from it, and yet for the most part it isn't really facilitating closer relationships.

Topspin, there are some people who can't put things down that are still there. The act of deleting or deactivating the account is what some people need as a delineating point of no longer participating. I've seen this happen with a lot of people on some forums I participate in. They can't just not go back; some ritual is needed to cut the tie.

And I, pressed for time at the moment, don't mean to be snarky at all. I'm wondering why one can't simply put it down.... stop looking except when it pleases?

I mean no harm, nor intention of armchair psychology here, as this relates as much to me and my perception of groups as it does to her. It's interesting (and profitable for Facebook) that a large group website can produce this reaction not just in this lady but in a host of people.

I sense a feeling of "I wish I didn't have to be here, but......" among many and I simply ask: Why not just be there when you want to be?

#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-11 00:51:50.41207+00 by: meuon [edit history]

The very reasons we love and accept you. As I have become more that way, my business partner has become more accepting of it. Nancy loves me in spite of, or because of, my not hiding much. It is a good thing to "be yourself".

Just to be clear with Topspin's deconstruction (which I don't dispute and mean to mull over more), the exact words were:

Just a critical reading of the quote by Dan... "she was much happier when she wasn't paying attention to Facebook."

As I'm less interactive with people by nature, perhaps I don't realize the social pressure and nuance of "not participating" vs "not being a member" of a group. I don't feel a social pressure to interact often in any group or even follow the group discussion much of time, particularly with a multi-headed, multi-threaded beast like Facebook, and that fact might color my perception here.

Many of us have feeds, websites, etc which lie fallow in our readers, bookmarks or favorites. We simply don't pay attention to them, but for whatever reason we don't delete them.

I suspect, and I'm definitely supposing here and may easily not have all the information for this supposition, that something more is in play with Dan's sister's decision.

I use it primarily to keep in touch with old school folks (many of which I actually liked, going to a small school and college), and other folks who I like but have moved away or changed jobs.

I block/hide annoying fiends quickly, leaving my timeline just the people I'm interested in keeping up with. I also use it for communicating with the nontechincal folks who seem to change ISPs, and therefore email addresses, at least every year.

The reason I started using Facebook was family, and my sister just got back from an extended vacation and posted that she was much happier when she wasn't paying attention to Facebook, everyone knew how to find her, and she was signing off.

I too have never worried about what privacy issues I have on Facebook 'cause it's pretty much all out there after thirteen years of Flutterby, a bunch o' Burning Mans, and whatever other droppings I've left across the net. My profile is unprotected, and my cell phone number is easily Googleable.

With family adopting other communication modes, the main thing left to Facebook is high school friends. I keep up with a few of them, but even there... well... we all went separate ways, largely, and the friends I'd like to stay more in touch with aren't generally active users.

I find Twitter useful, mostly because that's where the cool kids are still conversing, and it's kind of like hanging out on IRC. Though if my RSS feed from that fails I may drop off it, too.

On connecting pseudonyms to real names, anyone who frequents one of the places where I use a pseudonym and Flutterby would instantly make the connection. There are things about my personality that just don't hide well.

Only half naked? I think my issue for facebook is how easy it makes it for the mundane. While you can find many many years of stupid things I have said online as 'Meuon', it takes half a clue to put that together with my other lives. I'm not hiding much, I just hoping the entity is clueful.

#Comment Fouling the data stream. made: 2011-03-10 21:55:25.136895+00 by: whump

I'm using the ghostery plugin to stop all the FB widgets from loading on third party pages.

That's the ghastly thing about FB, even if you aren't using it, it's still stalking you.

I've been teetering on the edge of killing off my facebook profile for a few weeks now. It just doesn't seem to add much of significance to my life, and I am increasingly uncomfortable with the general smell of evil wafting over from Zuckerberg & Co.

At the same time, I never put any private information into facebook in the first place, so I don't really care how public they make it. What are they really going to do to me? I already put my own half-naked burning man photos up on my own web site, so they can't exactly out me any more than I have already done.

For me, Facebook has been a tool to communicate with family and old friends many of whom I don't really want to communicate with any more. I don't go "online" on Facebook and haven't accepted an invitation to join a group or install an app in a couple years.

Oddly, a bunch of my closest friends from grade school have zero web footprint. These are all people who were "nerds and geeks". While my parents and their generation seem to have adopted Facebook, many Gen-Xers avoid the web altogether. Odd...

I have a very clear division between my Facebook "friends" and LinkedIn "contacts". I like it that way. I also, oddly, use Twitter for work.