screw facebook and the horse it rode in on

so i've kept my word to more or less quit facebook, and posted no new status updates there (though i still, as promised, make snide remarks on the statuses of my pals).

The furor lately has been about facebook's attempt to steal the web out from under us, and indeed, there is a real danger of that, and it will suck if it happens. There's also the problem of facebook selling us out and invading our privacy. That's a real concern as well.

But for me, the most insidious effect of facebook was that I stopped writing. Now, you may say, and I'll agree, that blogging doesn't count as writing. But like a pea sized nugget after a week of constipation, I'll take what I can get, thank you very much (and you're welcome!).

Facebook taught me to compress my thoughts into their 480 character limit, or whatever it is. And if I couldn't compress, truncate. If I had something to say that was serious, it didn't belong on facebook, since folks there were more interested in jokes. Well, there's nobody here, so I can say whatever I like. At least, I can say what I like and pretend there's nobody here.

fb brought me in contact with some folks I haven't heard from in ages, and that was cool, for a while. After a bit, though, I see my own banality reflected back at me as I'm deluged with reports on what's for dinner, what song everyone's enjoying, how many hours of sleep we all had last night, and on and on -- in other words, exactly the same crap I was posting to facebook. Enough already.

There might be people out there posting useful stuff to facebook, and in truth, some of my friends there would post funny videos, interesting links, or just interesting personality-related stuff. But for the most part, facebook is a wasteland, and its attempt to turn the rest of the internet into a wasteland of "likes" and "checked-in"s is doomed to failure.

But more importantly to my own life, whether facebook lives or dies, I'm writing again, and it's good to be back, even if I have only as much to say here as I did on facebook.