Yes, yes.  The rumours are true.  And by rumours, I mean my declaration a few days ago that I’m leaving Facebook.  I’ve already commented on my reasonings which include consistant disregard for users privacy, and my fear of what that will bring once the company goes public.  It’s also no secret that I’ve long preferred Twitter over anything else.  Google+ is also on the table, and I’m again trying to bring it into my eco-system, but we’ll see how that goes.

But you know, I’m not going to mislead you, abandoning the largest social network is not an easy decision and it also scares me a little bit. I’ve already had numerous questions of why, and professed statements of my presence going to be missed.  Hell, by simply disassociating my Facebook account from Klout has dropped my score by six points.  This really is a big move in the realm of TheInterwebz™.

I remember when I first joined Facebook after the Virginia Tech shooting brought it into the mainstream (and don’t kid yourself, that’s what the boom began), connecting to all those people whom I’d lost contact with was exhilarating.  Watching my friend count steadily move up over the initial weeks had become an obsession.  But just like when you run into long lost acquaintances in the supermarket, you realize there were reasons why you lost touch.  Point blank, at the end of the day you couldn’t give a fuck about their existence.
Nostalgia is funny that way.
It wasn’t long before everyone was on Facebook, and it became a part of the daily routine.  Then came the retarded game requests.  The frequent (and tragic, by most other people’s standards) interface changes.  Privacy infractions went through the rough. Again. And Again.  Eventually, it came to be that I ussed it for the sake of using it.  My mind had become numb about the whole thing.   I, like it’s other 500 million users, had become a lemming.  It’s like how we as a society have become desensitized to television violence.
Then I read a post by Sean Bonner.
His post encapsulated most of what I and likely many others feel towards the social networking giant, only he had the courage to act on it.  He finally said fuck you to Mark Zuckerberg, and took social networking elsewhere.  This, to me, was quite inspiring.  If a guy who’s life strongly incorporates Facebook can walk away from it, why the hell can’t I?  There’s nothing he’s done, that I nor anyone else couldn’t do.  And really, studies are now finding that social networking is actually isolating us.

In short, while I am feeling somewhat apprehensive about my decision, I’m also increasingly more committed to the idea that this is the right thing to do.