yeah, I get that a lot of people feel that way, I just don’t. I guess I’m just not that interested in what’s new for people I lost touch with years ago, and I definitely don’t need daily (or more) updates on them or pictures of their cats or their deep thoughts on whatever.
The upside is that Facebook rarely aggrivates me 
I look at mine very briefly about twice a week.
Given that I take the attitide that religion and politics are nothing more than opinions and everyone is entitled to their opinion, it doesn’t rile me as much as some.
But for every facebook friend I have who spouts conservative crap, there is me posting liberal stuff on my own page, and for every ultraliberal (more rare), I probably post a bit of hard reality. Like an acquaintance’s wife who friended me and posts very conservative and Christian stuff on her page. She posted that she had counted the number of Free Clinics in the metro area and this was proof that we didn’t need Universal Healthcare. So on my page, I posted a summation of the effects and rules of the actual health care bill and then asked anyone to show me how this was going to destroy America.
Every now and then I think about closing it out, because it serves no real purpose in my life and provides no tangible value.
Too much of a good thing huh?
Oh, one more thing. It WAS massively entertaining to look up some old friends and find that an arrogant know-it-all bitch-cunt that I used to know was now an ardent Tea Party supporter.
The older you get, the more friends you wonder what happened to. I was thrilled to find an old friend from grade school, see how hes doing, and we talk.
The poke thing is really pointless, and I so wonder about those who do the restaurant thing, you own a fake restaurant and have to do all this buying and business stuff but its all pretend. Weirds me out.
I’m way too private a person to get involved with FB. I did have an account under a fake name just because people sometimes link to pictures on their FB account and I need to log in to see them. I put in a bunch of bullshit information when I set it up and probably only used it once every few weeks.
Lo and behold, the last time I tried to log in, I got a message saying that there was suspicious activity with the account and it was suspended. They said it was probably because I logged in to some fake FB clone or something but I know that’s not true. Anyway, to get my account back I was supposed to enter my birthday as a security thing but I have no idea what fake birthday I used for that account so I am shut out forever.
My suggestion is to change all your info to fake information (including changing your name), set up a temporary email account (like at hushmail.com), change that to your default and delete all the others. Change your password to random letters, and then deactivate your account. There is no way it can be salvaged from that.
I did that when I created a new account, and deleted my old one. It is completely unfindable, and it will never be activated again.
Next time use Jan 01 of your real birth year.
Your pal,
Raoul Essex-Lopresti
You can also report fake profiles, as those are often used for SPAM. I’ve recently tried removing my sex from my profile, so that maybe I’ll stop getting spam from nudie sites, with fake profiles trying to add me. But, while they kept coming, I got a few suspended.
“Not their real name” or “Does not represent a real person” are valid reasons to be reported.
That’s similar to my normal m.o. on all of my various regular accounts! I use the same fake birth date for all online accounts except for things like banking where the real one is required. In this case, I just hit random stuff on the drop down menu.
Most games are pointless. If they’re having fun, why does it matter?
I really like facebook, because it makes it easy to keep up with people I don’t talk to on a regular basis. I’m not a phone person, and no one writes actual letters anymore, so facebook does serve a real purpose for me.
I don’t post anything overly personal on my page, either. Anyone who needs to know personal details about me talks to me offline, and I probably have at least a third of my facebook friends “hidden” due to either excessive status updates, or maddeningly conservative or religious posts.
I don’t understand people that feel the need to update their status multiple times in a single day. Seriously, I don’t need to know every time you go grocery shopping or take a shit. You are not a celebrity. There are no paparatzzi following you. You’re really not as important as you seem to think you are.
Given the above, I think facebook has a lot to do with our increasingly self absorbed society.
I like facebook for the most part and I definitely appreciate the ‘hide’ feature. I’ve got a few friends and a few relatives hidden and it makes my world a happier place. 
Otherwise, I enjoy staying in touch with old friends and seeing pictures of my little cousins as they grow, etc.
The only really big peeve that I have lately is this one woman that I went to high school with who started selling Mary Kay and is all of a sudden very interested in me and keeps sending me emails about wanting to get together. :rolleyes: The funny thing is that awhile ago, as in maybe a year or so, I had a couple of questions relevant to her actual career and she basically just blew me off. So now, I just keep ignoring her emails and hoping she’ll get the hint.
The only thing that keeps me from deleting my facebook profile is Bejeweled. That and not wanting to explain over and over to people why I deleted my facebook profile.
At first I thought it was cool to reconnect with people from high school and college that I didn’t keep in touch with. Then I reconnected with them, and all it did was remind me of why I didn’t keep in touch with them in the first place.
LOL! I really like it. It’s like a sandbox where I can keep all the dysfunction, and sign in only when I feel up to dealing with it.
I’ve gotten back in touch with folks I really couldn’t have found any other way (An old boyfriend from Norway ferinstance) and best of all I’ve been able to nab a few photographs of myself and friends from way back. Being the second child, I didn’t have a lot of photos of my life.
There are people 've had to hide, and especially a few “aps” which drove me crazy. I’m glad they’re having fun, but I really don’t care about the new cartoon llama. . .
It’s nice to know the old folks are still our there, remember me, and are struggling through same as the rest of us.
ETA: I haven’t crossed the family line though, thank goodness! Except some cousins in IReland, who I otherwise would completely lose track of.
This is exactly my view on Facebook. Even down to the Bejeweled. A nice idea, in theory, but then I remembered that there was a good reason none of these people had any other way of contacting me…
Facebook really isn’t the problem. People being retarded is the problem.
I haven’t been on Facebook in ages, but I don’t see this as that big of a problem.
The friends on my Facebook friends list come in two stripes: Friends and People Who I Knew A Long Time Ago. Some of my friends are right-wing … but they’re not insufferable douche-bags, otherwise I wouldn’t be friends with them. I enjoy sparring with them politically as much as I enjoy it here. People Who I Knew A Long Time Ago who post the first instance of “You need to give your heart to Christ” or “Obama wants to kill your grandmother” and away they go. I figure that I’ve survived for the past 20 years or so without their sparkling wit … another 20 or 30 won’t kill me.
The hide button and I have become intimately acquainted. Every app that shows up get’s the boot. Farmville, Farmtown, Farmburg, Farmcity, Farmfarts, whatever.
And a couple of ‘friends’. I have no patience for extremist crap from either side.
I’m glad that this has passed me by to be honest. As someone else mentioned above, I’m far too much of a private person to ever want strangers knowing anything about me.
It does genuinely intrigue me how this phenomenon has gripped so many people. The concept of applying the term “friend” to someone you only speak to via electronic mediums seems odd to me.
A Friend to me is someone that I can call, after months of no contact, and pick up where we left off. A lot of Facebook seems like an obligation…yech! too much work.
And those people I haven’t spoken to since school? There is a reason for that, I don’t care!
In the immortal words of Alan Partridge. “I just hate…the general public”