That was it. I was fed up. I quit.
To wit:
(May 9, 2013 11:59PM) Goodbye Facebook. I know you noticed I wasn't coming by so much any more. That's just the way it is. Thanks for re-connecting me to some people I've missed, and for getting some recalcitrant relatives on-line.
But your idea of "curated" content seems to mean that I see my friends' faces next to ads more than next to important happenings in their lives. You don't tell me what's happening with friends who prefer different types of content, and it turns out that my public posts (like this one) might reach 12% of the people who are connected to me as "friends."
I've been communicating on-line since... well, for a long time, and I've seen technology make for great good and great evil.
Facebook isn't either of those things. It's like TV, except other people can hear you yell at the screen, the ignorant and crazy talk-show morons from the extreme wings of political "thought" have infected many of your friends and family in a way that can't help but make one think of Donald Sutherland and legumes.
If you have a blog, feel free to send me the link. My email is jluning@gmail.com My personal twitter is jonluning
Take care - My friends I'll miss a lot; being monetized, not so much.
Within a few hours, several friends had sent me suggestions for leveraging Facebook to connect with them, but without having to deal with the ads, selective content, and insane user interface choices.
So I relented.
Having started to enjoy the quirky timeliness of Twitter, and having begun to connect with a more diverse array of personalities there, I went back to look for a "Social Media Manager" program. I had used TweetDeck in a past life, but it's recently dropped support for Facebook, so that wouldn't work. I used to use Seesmic on my phone, but that was eaten up by HootSuite and has been declared "end of life," as the software euphemism goes.
So, for the moment, HootSuite is it. The consequence, of course, is that now my friends on Facebook see my post as rather disingenuous, as I have more content going there than before. Honestly, this is a result of testing the transition, and I expect it to smooth out in the future.
For now, anything over a sentence or two, you can expect to find as a link to this blog, and not living on Facebook.
