Facebook? It just doesn't do it for me anymore.

? It just doesn't do it for me anymore.



Some of you may have recently noticed that I’m no longer on Facebook (FB). Oh, the horror! What a way to end 2010! For some (such as my close friends and immediate family), this event is likely to resonate more while for others, it may translate to my receipt of occasional emails with subject lines like “You off Facebook?!” For the other, ~98-99% of my Facebook friends, I’m not sure anyone will notice.

So why no more Facebook? Why now? No, it’s not related to any resolutions for 2011 and no, I don’t have any FB stalkers that have recently taken things to the next level (and even if I did, Facebook’s block function is a more than adequate solution to take care of those). Also, why is it that I assume ~98-99% of my current FB friends won’t care? The latter should be easy to grasp after you’ve read the rest of this post but first, I think I can sum up why I’ve deactivated my Facebook account in a fairly simple way: Facebook just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

I find my rationale quite elegant (and applicable) because when you think about it, Facebook has been built to (ideally) do different things for different people. To take it one step further, if you consider an individual user, Facebook can do/does (or should do) different things for them at different times in their life. Obviously, this is one of the powers behind Facebook; it is built to offer something to everyone and is designed to be used across generations, cultures, and personalities. Ultimately, whether you post one status update a day or ten, whether your photos section consists of one particularly flattering profile picture or 100 photo albums, or whether your number of friends is 10 or 1000, Facebook is a platform that caters to all . . . or does it? In particular, based on my decision to exit Facebook, I’m wondering how well it does with individual users over time . . . granted Facebook hasn’t been around THAT long, so I don’t know if they’ve yet to encounter any issues with customer retention, etc. However, I wonder how many others out there started a Facebook account, were active users for a significant period of time (at least one year) and have now moved on . . .

Facebook has changed since I joined, I’ve changed since I joined Facebook . . . my Facebook friends have also changed (both in terms of their personal lives and their Facebook activity) . . . all of this has left me wanting something more or something different from Facebook . . . and I’m not getting it.

Note: in a future post, I may delve into the various changes I allude to above however for now, I'll refrain on digging too deep and hopefully what's below will provide you with a satisfactory top-level view.

I joined Facebook in the summer of 2007 when I was traveling abroad and looking for a way to share my pictures with friends and family. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with other picture viewing platforms such as Flickr so I turned to Facebook. My first few months on Facebook were a rousing success; not only were my pictures a big hit, but I became friends with everyone on the trip and those connections led to many new relationships, other international travel, and innumerable great memories.

When I look back at my start on Facebook, I remember the excitement of being in the “building phase” (searching for and connecting with current friends and family) as well as the uncertainty and nervousness associated with the “extending phase” (searching for and connecting with old friends and/or extended family members you hadn’t been in touch with for a significant period of time). Both phases had their awkward moments but both were invaluable as they provided me with my Facebook friend foundation, a group that in the years since has for the most part stayed relatively constant (and relatively valuable in terms of keeping me informed, entertained, and/or interested).

In the last few years, Facebook friending became more opportunistic in nature (a good friend at work who you spent time with socially or the not so ugly girl you met at the bar who claimed she “totally wanted you to friend her before the night was over”) while Facebook itself became a place for me to take the term transparency to another level. Those of you who know me well realize that since high school (or maybe college), I’ve always been a pretty transparent guy but if you’re at all familiar with the depth and range of my Facebook page, and have any sense of the frequency of my status updates and/or other Facebook actions, then you know I was definitely a Facebookaholic. As with other friends and family, I know that my level of Facebook activity has correlated with certain events and times (being single vs. being in a relationship, having a mobile device which provides 24 hr access to Facebook vs. not, having a job you love vs. a job you hate, among others) however while my investment in Facebook has flowed and ebbed, it was for the most part a strong constant in my life from the start of 2008 through much of 2010.

As for my more recent Facebooking, I’ve found that the majority of my time has been spent declining invitations to events held at various bars and establishments throughout Boston, wondering how a variety of obscenely attractive girls ended up in my “People You May Know” section (probably because our mutual friends are various bars and establishments throughout Boston), and blocking various friends from my news feed because they were clogging things up and/or because I found that their material wasn’t adding any value to my Facebook experience (don’t worry: I’m not so naïve as to think I haven’t been blocked from the news feeds of ~98-99% of my FB friends).

Do my recent Facebooking actions make me a Facebook snob? Am I bad person? Do they imply that I think my Facebook friends are boring? Am I inconsiderate, selfish, and pompous? To all, of course not . . . but opinions outside of my own could vary. If anything, I suspect I am just another Facebook user and as such, have been working to customize and adjust my account in response to either my own, ever-evolving personal feelings, or the ever-changing actions and behaviors of my Facebook friends. However, if I were to characterize my recent behavior using a Facebook profile adjustment portfolio, I’d say I’ve had 5% in pro-active changes (e.g., searching for something I like and liking it) and 95% in reactive changes (e.g., liking something after I see that my brother likes it and/or blocking someone from my news feed after I throw up in my mouth a little bit upon reading their latest status update). In sum, my attempts to make my Facebook work for me have not been successful and a variety of other recent triggers (or realizations) have also led me to my decision to break ties with Facebook:

1. My close friends aren’t all that active on it anymore . . . but then again, my definition of “active” with regards to Facebook is quite skewed.
2. The number of Facebook friends who are now married and use Facebook as a forum for talking about their spouse, soon to be born child, and/or current children. For the record, I don’t have anything against spouses or children (unborn or born), but I’m just not there yet.
3. My interest in (and need for) news and information across a wide array of topics, particularly healthcare, has been growing over the last several months and Facebook isn’t helping me address these.
4. My time has become more valuable.
5. The desire to share the excruciating minutiae of every single event that transpires in my life has waned considerably (translation: I believe my life has become less riveting to others . . . but not to me of course).
6. For the sports teams, media outlets, and local establishments I’m friends with, there is too much overlap with what I’m seeing in other online venues and/or platforms . . . if I were going to use Facebook and Facebook only, then this probably wouldn’t be an issue but if I’ve already heard about something on ESPN, 98.5 the Sports Hub, and through the Boston Globe, I don’t need to see it on Facebook.
7. The activity associated with pages I’ve liked. As an example, I really like the Harry Potter movies . . . but I don’t need an update every time Daniel Radcliffe does another interview to discuss The Deathly Hallows Part I.
8. Growing concern that continual bombardment with the pictures of the wild and obnoxious various 20-somethings I’m friends with will lead me to start a fraternity at Suffolk University and become a real-life “Frank the Tank” (translation: I’m 32 and trying to enjoy it without reflecting too much on what was and/or could have been during my 20’s).
9. If I’m presently bored with my current Facebook experience, there isn’t a whole lot I can see happening which will change that sentiment (e.g., my current friend cohort will likely remain relatively fixed, etc.).
10. See number 4.

I know what you might be thinking: if you look at the reasons I’ve listed above and consider my other comments, you might imagine a scenario where I could simply de-friend several people (or block them), scale down my Facebook activity, apply a paradigm to my information searches (start with Yahoo Finance Medical/Pharmaceutical News, then Twitter, etc.), and/or identify what I really like about Facebook at present, and focus current efforts on exploiting Facebook for that. Sure, those are all logical and reasonable actions I could take but in response, I’d probably say “see #’s 4 and 10 above”.

For the record, a few things I’ll miss while I’m not on Facebook:

1. Ed Smith’s status updates.
2. Seeing the latest pictures of Ella Claire Smith (however, I am confident I can talk Paul C. Smith and/or Jenny MacLeod Smith into emailing these to me).
3. Perry Sparrow’s comments on Ed Smith’s status updates.
4. Russell B. Smith’s comments on my status updates.
5. Abhas Gupta’s photo albums . . . they always make me wish I was where he’d been and I usually mumble “FML” while viewing them.
6. Chatting with Lauren Purpura. Of the 10 to 12 chats I’ve ever had with friends on Facebook, I’m pretty sure 6 or 7 of them were with LP.
7. The things Chris Pratt “likes”.
8. All of my photo albums (thankfully, these are preserved for viewing and downloading in the future).
9. Seeing Adnan Nalwala’s latest attempts at comedy.
10. Seeing Kevin Sullivan’s latest attempts at being awesome.

Less than four years . . . it’s hard to believe that I wasn’t on Facebook longer. I know that it’s had a significant impact on my life, if only based on the amount of time I spent using it. I reconnected with countless friends and family members. I shared a lot of thoughts and commentary, and I even created a fan page . . . for myself. I don’t know if I’ve said goodbye to Facebook forever but for now, I’m content to walk away and savor a Facebook-less world . . . place your bets now on how long this holiday will last.

As many of you may know, Facebook recently overtook Yahoo to become the second largest source of video traffic (Google is #1) and I have no doubt that FB will not only continue to grow rapidly, but it will also work to develop new features and content to keep users engaged. However, I think one of its biggest challenges may lie in customer retention throughout time. You could call it the “Managing and Anticipating the Evolution of a Facebooker” dilemma or something like that. Granted, it may not matter to their bottom line given customer turnover is part of any business, total Facebook participation is at such a high level, and because Facebook has pushed aside MySpace and numerous other social media platforms to become the leader in its market. All that aside, I would be curious to know how others views the challenges of long-term customer retention for Facebook and/or if any studies or analyses that address this topic have been conducted.

Lastly, just so it’s out there, I am in no way a Facebook basher and my intention with this entry is not to bring into question the value of Facebook, spur FB to consider how to address the concerns I’ve brought up, and/or drive others to deactivate their Facebook accounts (on the latter two, it’s not like I could influence such things to happen anyway). However, I am curious to know if there are others out there who have found their Facebook experience to be changing and/or who might have recently walked away from Facebook after realizing that at the end of the day, it just wasn’t doing anything for them any longer.

To close, in an ironic twist, I just realized that my initial audience for this entry (as well as others in the future) is now considerably limited given my past blog readership has been driven primarily by my Facebook account . . . oh well, I’ll always have personal email alerts . . . and Twitter.