Leaving Facebook Part 1
I am deleting my Facebook account on June 1, 2010. While I don’t necessarily want to, I feel that the company’s policy about privacy and the ways they manage my data are increasingly problematic and the difficulty of leaving that particular ecosystem will only grow harder the longer I stay. So I’ve given my friends notice and will be collecting contact info from those who I genuinely want to keep in touch with. I’m doing a few things in preparation for this move. I’ve deleted the Facebook app from my phone in order to help me get used to spending less time checking it and, last night, as I began to get some IM contacts from people, I realized that iChat wasn’t going to cut it for keeping up with people through IM, so I reinstalled Adium and set that up with all of my various accounts (Gmail, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Me.com) so that I can stay in touch with as many people through those systems as I can. Unfortunately, Adium doesn’t yet support audio or video on these services, but the fact that it supports way more protocols is worth it. I can also switch over to iChat for those few people who I do actually (though very occasionally) use audio or video chat.