I Am Leaving Facebook, Why And How You Should Too

I am tired of facebook

Facebook lets me know what my friends are doing. But that is just a theory today, in practice facebook is virtually what reddit is, a source of random "interesting" stuff.

I am so losing touch with my real friends. We do not email each other. We do not read each others blogs, and we do not have discussions. This sucks. And this is because of facebook.

There is yet another problem with facebook, I have written may be thousands of status updates, but for someone to view them it is very difficult, as it is filled with all kinds of unrelated stuff like what I liked, what I commented else where, my photos and so on.

Facebook is also a huge privacy nightmare, so I play it safe and keep my privacy options as tight as possible. But then my writings, my status updates, my pseudo-intellectual discussions with fellow geeks and interest based enthusiasts, they are all lost to the world.

So I am moving from facebook, and here is how

I am going to stop writing status updates on facebook. Or may be I will limit it to purely personal, very close friends and family targeted updates.

I am not going to move to twitter, or some next social network. I am going to blog.

But my friends do not read blogs, blog is a pull mechanism not push like facebook. Or email. So I have created a mailing list, and I am asking everyone I know to subscribe to it. After I write a blog post, I am going to copy paste the content of that post in a mail, and then send it to people who have subscribed to my mailing list.

My mailing list is my new friend list. If you want in, you join, if you feel I am spamming, you leave. I have also created a few groups my friends can pick, so my family does not have to be spammed by my posts about python, and users of my open source libraries do not have to be spammed by my views on FDI in retail in India.

I am using mailchimp for this, they have a free plan, damn easy to setup and create groups, forms that I am adding on my blog where my friends can come and subscribe/unsubscribe etc.

My friends will receive my blog posts as email, they will read it, and because I want discussion, I am going to invite them to come to my blog and leave a public comment. But many friends of mine wont do that, instead they would just reply to mail, call me an asshole and I would tell them some secrets about their mama their dad dont know. We will be friends and we will talk in the privacy of mail.

I want all my friends to do this too

It is easy, you have to setup a blog, and a mailing list. There are numerous free providers for both, but geeks will have to lead the way. One does not have to formally create a mailing list, most email services allows one to create email list and they can do it themselves. I do not have that many friends that I can not add them all to a list one evening.

The posts we create, the discussions we have, the mails we share, will all be ours forever, not on the whims of what Facebook as decided.

Writing public mails to friends is a tradition historical figures have employed. This helps us communicate with world via a proxy of friend. Since our posts would be public on our blog; instead of a complex mix of private and public space called facebook, where we are misled into thinking we are writing private stuff, which turns public at some future time we did not expect; we would write with that caution we show when we are public. We will be more polite, we will be more careful of our language, and we will interact with the world.

More importantly we will be owners of our data, we will have years worth of public writing experience. Politics is a profession of using one-s communication skills to gain power. So many of worlds problems are related to communication. We becoming good at communication, which we will by public writing, is only good for everyon.

So my friend, join my mailing list now

Click on this link, enter your email address and pick a topic of interest about which you would want to hear from me, and done!

PS: But this is a usability nightmare compared to facebook

Yes it sounds a bit difficult, but it does not have to be. Like I hinted, most email software, web or desktop, allow email lists. There are blogging services that allow you to create a new post by sending a mail. Just send to your blog private URL along with your friends, and the post would be published and delivered to your friends.

[If the geek in you is wondering how you can refernce the URL of the yet to be genrated blog post be included in mail, well dont, just include the link to your blog, your post be there by the time your friends get there to comment publicly].