Smell you later, The Facebook

So, Matt quit The Facebook like a month or two ago. No one noticed, which is not all that surprising because Matt was a very inactive Facebooker. But then, people seemed to suddenly realize he was gone this last week and were wondering why. Their reaction seemed to indicate The Facebook quitting behavior was the equivalent of mild insanity.
So, if you actually dare, or actually care, below are his reasons. And, remember, this is a man who once ranted for five years about the value cards at grocery stores. You see how far that got him. Matt's only posting this so no one thinks they were de-friended, and because people were asking.



There are several reasons Matt quit The Facebook, but let's start with the things he liked: Matt liked seeing photos of friends, their kids, their activities and other things he wouldn't normally get a chance to see. He also liked checking in with a few old friends.
And...that's about it.
So, one of the problems was that Matt didn’t really get a lot out of The Facebook.

On to the dislikes:
- Matt didn’t like that he couldn’t control what was being posted on his page. Of course, the interconnectivity is the selling point for most people, but it annoyed Matt. People that Matt worked with would come up and say, “Hey I saw that stupid hat you wore on Christmas.” And Matt didn’t even know it had been posted. But there it was. Matt could not control what came out, when. That's why all the comments on the blog are moderated. Matt is a content dictator.

- Second reason. Matt had trouble with work sources friending me. Potentially, that could lead to good stories. (One of the mayoral candidates had a facebook page for her campaign.) But what if Matt friends one source and not another? Or unfriends a source? Matt could have denied all requests, but even that got tricky. Just the possibility of answering a question about The Facebook with a source was so beyond stupid Matt didn’t want to deal with it.

- Third: Poking. That is stupid. It's just playing to our most base qualities in life. Boo poking.

- Four. Many, many will debate this but Matt does a fair job of keeping in touch with people. He calls them, arranges visits or emails every once in a great while. But some of the people friending Matt were clearly just collecting friends because Matt had never even heard of them.

- Fifth. The Facebook has a lot of applications and games that are addictive time wasters. Matt's not claiming they weren’t fun or interesting, but he’d rather waste his time reading a book, watching a movie, writing letters to Jimmy Carter, building the perfect Fantasy Baseball team or running.

- Finally, Matt started to get uncomfortable after reading about The Facebook’s policy on owning the information on the personal pages. The thought they could sell that information or use it in an advertising campaign really made Matt sick to my stomach. And don't believe all the hype that The Facebook is the same as Google, where the corporate motto is "Don't be evil." The Facebook can get sold. And The Facebook CEO would like to own a jet. Don't be fooled by these new companies: they want to make money, as much as possible. They only have your interests at heart as much as it keeps them profitable. The blog probably has some of the same possibilities, but Matt takes the chance here because he can control content.

So, there you go. The Facebook is no more and it was not killed by my parent's friends. It was killed by the very mechanism that make it so popular. How ironic. Now, about those FreshValue cards...