It's been a long time coming, but I think that it is finally the hour to commit to print my reasons for being one of the five people on this planet that is not on Facebook. Seeing as Mondays are complete crap for television now that 24 and even Heroes are on hiatus, let me just sit back and fill you in on my thought process while Mr. John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival provide the background music. I scored a copy of "The Long Road Home - the Ultimate John Fogerty/Creedence Collection" from Amazon for $2.99 the other day, so I'm feeling mellow and groovin' right along to the solid sounds of the bayou.
But enough stalling. Without further ado, here's why (in no particular order) I do not have a Facebook account, nor will I unless forced to do so under penalty of death or as a requirement for a job paying a minimum of six figures.
- I'm a control freak. I maintain my own webserver in my apartment and I have chosen to do so because I can have total control over the software that runs my blog and what goes on that machine. That machine isn't shared by any other users, and if I decide that I want to add something to the server - like Google Analytics, for example - I can do so without having to check for permission or fiddle around with somebody else's poorly written "one size fits all" code. Of course this means more responsibility for maintenance and security on my part(as was evidenced by the downtime experienced when my server went kaput), but in the long run the maintenance has been fairly minimal. Plus, I'm a geek and so my inner geek respects the rest of me more because I run my own server and host my own blog.
- I'm not a shutterbug. I don't take a lot of pictures, nor do I mess around with tagging individuals in the pictures that I do take. I'm also not that concerned with what pictures I'm in that were taken by whom...the pictures are already out there and I'm not arrogant enough to think that I could ever make anyone remove anything that I didn't like. Hey, I did whatever I was doing in the picture when it was taken, so I can't really deny it anyway. Because I already have my own blog, the main reason I can see for facebook is to pass photos around and since I've already stated my indifference to photography, Flickr does just fine by me. AND my pictures are viewable by everybody, so you don't have to be part of some special club to see them.
- I have enough drama in my life. This one is more of a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but it is a factor I will not deny. I have enough trouble keeping up with the blogs I follow already, nevermind adding in a whole plethora of blogs/walls from every friend I've ever known to keep up with. While I'm narcissistic enough to think that people are interested in my up-to-the-minute status when I deign to post it (via Twitter or whatever IM program I'm using), I don't really have time to keep up with everyone else's status. I think we've all heard the horror stories of people accidentally forgetting to set a relationship status and being deluged minutes (yea, seconds) later with questions of, "Ooooh! Does this mean that you and Janey BROKE UP?" Even unemployed I've got too much drama going on in my life to worry about crap like that.
- There's a reason I didn't keep up with people from high school. Like a typical guy, I have a few really good friends, a pretty good smattering of friends, and a lot of acquaintances - and then there's everybody else. I've pretty much made an effort to contact the people I'm interested in contacting and keeping in contact with and I just don't really care about everyone else. It sounds ridiculously calloused, I'm sure, but I figure that if I was really interested in being friends with someone and they were important to me, I would have been in touch with them by now. Stages in life happen, and if I don't keep up with everyone from every one of them that I've gone through, well...I'm okay with that. Besides, there are some people out there that I don't want to make it easy to find me for, and so if they're going to make an effort they're going to have to use Google, for cryin' out loud.
- I'm not a cookie cutter person. Now before you go flipping out on me and get all offended, I have nothing against anyone who has a facebook page and spends copious amounts of time fiddling around with it. Plenty of people have (I'm sure) great facebook pages and I don't think any less of someone for using facebook rather than anything else. All I'm saying is that I want you to read the first point in this list, and then realize that I feel driven to express myself as much as possible, which means that I like solutions that can be completely customized if I so choose. As much customization as facebook may have in the templates, at some basic level there are certain restrictions that facebook imposes which have a common denominator for every page. MySpace has the same issue. Changing the fonts and background image does not a unique page make and I feel that I can't be as free with my ideas of what I want the BrainDrain to be if I limit myself to someone else's framework. Sure I'm using MovableType as an engine for the blog now, but if I really want to get in there and monkey with the perl modules, the CSS, flash widgets, whatever, I can totally do that if I put my mind to it. Have I? Barely. But I could, and that's more important to me.
- When Facebook gets superseded by The Next Big Thing (TM), I don't want to have one more piece of web detritus to manage or try to contain. Let's face it, facebook is currently the bee's knees for most people but that probably won't be the case forever. Something else is waiting in the wings to explode onto the scene and when it does, facebook will become the virtual graveyard that MySpace already has become and that Orkut and Friendster were years before that. Many people have abandoned MySpace profiles just sort of hanging out there that they never check and I, for one, don't want to have a trail of virtual corpses littering my path through the internet. The BrainDrain has been updated a few times, but for the most part it is a living thing that has evolved with me and will continue to be my oratorical platform of choice. Plus, I don't want to have my blogging history strewn across multiple sites; the BrainDrain was started in 2004 and is still going strong, and every post I've ever written can be searched and accessed. Users don't have to jump from site to site to see where I've been. If someone is really bored, they can start from the beginning and chart my personal growth through five years of blog posts. Can your social networking site deliver that at the moment?
- I want people to come to me, not just randomly be reminded of me as they glance down a "friends" list. This will be the most hubris that I exhibit in this post, but I want people to have to come search for me to see what I have to say. I (sometimes) put a lot of thought into my posts and generally want to express my ideas, and I labor under the notion that those who read my posts regularly are interested in what I have to say and that they find my words entertaining at the very least. I don't really want to be the "I'm bored, let's see what.....oh, hey, Drew....is up to" (although I'm sure that has happened for some of my readers more than a few times). I think I tend to enjoy the community engendered by some blogs with a small (but dedicated) readership rather than posts that are accessible to any Tom (is not my friend), Dick, and Harry to read. Sure my blog is out there available to anyone who wants to read it, but they kind of have to look for it first. Whether one of my posts gets linked to another offsite post via a TrackBack, or the person knows me and wants to find out more information, I want them to come looking for something specific and maybe find something else of interest once they arrive. Think of the 'Drain as a local mom & pop store that all the locals know and like to frequent versus the corporate one-stop-shop for generic items that is Wal-Mart. Like I said, hubris. But that's why I have this blog.
So there you have it. Those are probably the most prevalent reasons for my aversion to facebook. I debated whether or not to enable comments on this post, specifically because I don't really want to deal with all the facebook zealots trying to convert me or tell me why my perceptions of certain points are wrong or errant. I've heard it all before and unless you can prove to me that I will get a million dollars the moment I sign up for a FB account, your missives will go unheeded. In fact, if you get too lippy, you can be sure that your comments will just fade into the ether. There goes that control thing again...but that's why I have my own blog. On the 'Drain, the Drew giveth and the Drew taketh away.
I'll leave facebook to all those of you people who love it and have time for it while I repair to the top of Curmudgeon Crag and blithely post my thoughts for whoever will listen to the crazy old hermit who only comes into town a few times a month to yell at small children and haggle over the price of fruit at the market.
