Yo AmitU, Aren't you facebook dead?

I have been running an experiment since sometime where I am trying to move away from facebook. Its been three weeks since it started, so lets review how it has been so far.

But before we do that, please subscribe to my mailing list if you havent already :-)

Did anything good come out of it so far?

I have some 25 friends who signed up on my mailing list! :-) Trying to not SPAM them, and trying to write the perfect first post that will justify my appreciation I have been stuck in a perfectionism-paralysis and not yet send anything to them. May be I will send them a link to this post.

The first major positive that came out of this move is I have started maintaining a spark file. If I think of something, I have an urge to do something about it, so far I used to go post it on facebook wall, and it used to be lost, but in last three weeks I have written some 11000 words in my spark file. I even thought of building a spark file web service backed by some iPhone app, as currently I am maintaining it in Notes app in my iPhone, and I always worry what if I lose it, there is no undo in Notes, and it is very easy to delete everything in the note, so every so often I manually mail the whole content to my gmail. This is not perfect at all. I have also noticed that most of my spark note file is publicish.

I have also started a "spark file"-ish page on angularjs.

"Yo AmitU, Aren't you facebook dead?"

This is the most common question I encounter when I post comments on facebook these days, so let me clarify. Here is what I wrote what I am going to do in my leaving facebook post:

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 do not intend to leave facebook altogether, my friends are still there. I intend to start talking through my blog post and mailing list, but keep listening on facebook.

Apologies for the (click-bait?) misleading headline :-)

My personal stuff will still go to facebook, facebook will remain my photo sharing app, where I want to tightly control who sees what. I will continue to drop trivial comments here and there, if I do not see them as blogable material, or when I am trying thrash out some idea with friends, where facebooks comment notification allows a better communication, and chat is not appropriate as it is too private and too forceful.

"Aren't your facebook promotion of blog articles SPAM?"

So I wrote an article on unintended SPAM, where I implied I have different kind of audiance and to better target those audiance I have groups in my mailing list.

But if I keep posting my blog links on my facebook I continue to SPAM my friends. I want to continue to use facebook to reach friends who are not yet in my mailing list, and yet not SPAM my friends who have already subscribed to my list and are receiving emails from me [these friends have advantage of picking the topics on which they want to receive emails, and thus do not have to get SPAM from me].

So here is what I have decided: I have created a friend list where I manually add my friends when they subscribe to mailing list, and when posting on facebook about my latest blog post, I would change privacy setting to not show it to them.

But would it not also completely hide those posts and all comments on them to my subscriber friends? Yes it would, and therefore I would discourage comments on those status updates.

Conclusion

This appears to be working for me so far, I am writing more meaningful stuff, tho not yet publishing them often. I feel I will never lose my friends who are on the mailing list, whether or not Facebook survives, so there is something more special about them.