Facebook has just recorded its 500 millionth user, but it has also lost this one . . .
BY THE TIME I was 13 years old, I, and all my friends, had an email account, and an instant messenger on MSN or Yahoo! to talk to people we’d never met.
By 16, we had Bebo accounts and whiled away hours “sharing the luv” and carefully choosing our “other half”. If you were into music, you might have had a MySpace page.
Then we went to college and heard about this great “new Bebo” called Facebook, which was pretty similar to Bebo but looked slicker and didn’t have Kylie from Sheffield calling you “babez”.
Later, we downloaded Skype so we could chat to our friends in Australia who originally left for a few months but now might never return.
Social networking sites have traditionally been transient in their popularity. But is Facebook bucking the trend?
It claims to have more than 500 million users, a figure still growing at a fairly steady rate of 10 to 15 million per month. Seventy per cent of users are from outside the US and 130 million users log into their Facebook accounts on any given day.
But I am not one of them.
I deactivated my Facebook account in February 2009. I was 20 and taking a year out from my degree to study abroad. As I sat in my dark, damp bedroom, I cursed the California sunshine, creeping in through the blinds and creating a glare on my screen, preventing me from looking at a photo of two people I didn’t know, both of whom were hammered drunk. The it dawned on me: I had been looking at photos like this on Facebook for two hours. Not just that particular day, but every day.
With only a few months left in the Mediterranean climate of San Francisco before returning to the overcast skies and grey concrete of UCD, I decided Facebook was holding me back. I was allowing my year in America to pass me by. “Are you sure you want to leave Facebook?” I was asked. “Yes,” I clicked.
In the beginning it was difficult. Every day after I checked my e-mails, I was confronted with an empty feeling, like a recently retired footballer who wakes up to realise he doesn’t have a training session to go to. Slowly, I grew accustomed to it and learned to live without it.
The hardest part about going cold turkey was knowing I could go back just as easily as I left. When you deactivate your account, it merely becomes dormant until the next time you log in, when everything goes back to the way it was. Facebook retains all your information, friends and photographs in case you change your mind. If you want Facebook to delete all your information permanently – a step I have yet to take, out of laziness more than anything else – you have to delve deep into their Help section to learn how.
Although people are usually surprised when I tell them I don’t have a Facebook account, it doesn’t make a big difference to my daily life. It seems to bother my friends more than it bothers me. Juicy nuggets of gossip are prefixed with: “If you weren’t such a (insert expletive here) and had a Facebook account, you’d know that . . . blah blah blah.”
Friends who derive pleasure from tagging their pals in photos find it hugely frustrating when they try to tag me and then remember that I am no longer a member of their community.
In May, several technology websites reported “delete Facebook” was trending as a popular Google search. The popularity of YouTube tutorials on how to permanently delete your private information from Facebook has soared.
The reasons people quit Facebook are many, but often people cite Facebook’s controversial privacy policy, which has been described as “intrusive” and “overbearing”. For me, it was a more personal decision. I have no objections to Facebook; like most social networks, it’s a great way for people to connect and interact with one another. My issue was with my own unhealthy usage patterns.
When it came to ending my relationship with Facebook, it was a case of: “It’s not you, it’s me.”
