I want to write a wonderfully eloquent rant against this gigantic walled garden that just about everyone is using these days, but really don’t have it in me, because I don’t have a coherent set of arguments– really it’s a gut thing. I just hate Facebook. I want it to wither and die!

I’ve been blogging for more than 7 years, and for all of that time anyone who wants to see what I’m up to can stop by this site or subscribe to my RSS feed. Without asking me. Without bugging me. Same goes for Twitter. You want to know what’s on my mind that might to too trivial for me to even blog about? Then follow me. No need to ask, no need for me to give permission. Simple.

But Facebook? Blah! Friend requests. Application requests. Stupid pointless Farmville and Mafia Wars updates from friends whose boredom has to cross into my field of view, and I have to opt out of receiving this shit.

I killed my first Facebook account permanently last year, but recently created a new one because I didn’t want to be out of the loop when friends announced stuff exclusively on Facebook.

I understand that this is one of the strengths of Facebook, that you can maintain contact with friends. That’s why it took off, like some kind of MySpace for people who hadn’t suffered terrible head trauma.

But now I want to kill my profile all over again.

Facebook is becoming more evil all the time, because they don’t exist to help you connect with friends; they exist to extract data and relationship information from you, in order to leverage it to become bigger and better at marketing. They want to keep you on the site, modulating content and discussion and feeding you astonishingly insulting personalized advertising. Like a cult once you’re on Facebook you will only be talking to other facebook members, even though many of the features that Facebook offers duplicate functionality available on the outside. Your wall is a bit like a twitter or RSS feed– except it can only be seen by other Facebook users. If you like using the Facebook interface but want to keep track of what someone on the outside is up to, tough shit. You get a messaging system which is like email from 1995 and again you can only use it to talk to other Facebook users. You have dumb time-wasting apps to kill time within the Facebook site, rather than wandering off to kill time in more random and useful ways outside the walls.

And now when you do leave the site, Facebook wants to come with you! It is now appearing in little widgets on other popular sites, in the form of cancerous little oblongs wanting to know what you like, because God knows your opinion matters to these people since they need to know how to better sell you shit. As far as Facebook is concerned the world is just one giant focus group.

So now I’m already sounding like a curmudgeon, and I haven’t even mentioned the whole privacy issue which is what’s got people really unhappy, but others are certainly talking about it and I think everyone can agree that it grows harder to understand and keep track of what they are doing with your data all the time.

Blar blar blar so I did rant a bit after all…down with Facebook!