One Big Reason Why You Should Go On A Facebook Diet

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Is Facebook Our New Best Friend?

Spending non-quality time on Facebook is something we all are guilty of; very few have managed to escape its web. From showing off to feeling lonely, Facebook has seen more sides of us than even some of our closest “peeps”.

Now don’t get me wrong — I am well aware of the positive aspects that social networking brings to our society. From keeping in touch to expanding our horizon (and even networking), there are numerous benefits it has to offer. However if not used cautiously, social networking can take over our lives and leave behind a feeling of discontent and emptiness, irrespective of how many status updates we continue to post.

Here are a few reasons why you should avoid over-indulging in the world of Facebook (and other social networks) and revisit the wonders of the real world.

Let’s be honest: no one does.

Facebook has managed to soften the line between ‘acquaintances’ and ‘friends’, giving us the illusion that everyone is our pal. Not only that, but somehow quality is discounted and one is perceived by the quantity of friends they keep.

Ensure that you can distinguish between people that are close to your heart from those that are close to the ‘Like’ button in the endless realm of Facebook. Make ‘real’ time for your ‘real’ friends. Though Facebook might excel in getting people closer, it is equally sophisticated in adding distance between relationships that we might overlook.

Have we all forgotten the joys of screaming out your engagement plans or the news about getting a promotion in person? Does the exciting news of expecting a niece or a nephew sound equally thrilling when you hear it through Facebook? Have our lives really gotten so busy that we consciously choose to deprive ourselves of the love and affection sharing such moments in person or over a phone call can offer?

To me, these are the little joys of life that I wouldn’t want to miss out on simply for the sake of convenience. Aren’t these happy emotions simply going to waste when there is no one to receive them? Have you ever looked back at an event and cherished Facebook ‘Likes’ over the shocked and excited faces of your friends — or that screaming hug from your sibling?

Though Facebook might bring us to conclude that everything is public information, be assured that it is not true. We all know of people whose life you could simply live through their status updates or Twitter feed. From what they had for lunch to the color of their workout shoes, does the world really need to know it all?

Though information is much easier to share in the virtual world, we forget the fact that not everything is for everyone’s ears. Consciously or unconsciously, we are influencing our circle and also the world’s perception about us. Your young niece doesn’t need to know about your party weekends and your grandpa can live without hearing about your ex’s. Save the world the trouble!

Facebook secretly converts everyone into attention seekers whether you admit it or not. Though I’ve never spent extended periods of time on Facebook, it doesn’t take long to realize that you feel left out when nothing is ‘happening’ in your life worth updating the world about. Subconsciously we end up comparing our lives to everyone else’s and the feeling of despair creeps in.

We need to let go of identifying ourselves with our Facebook page and recognize that our actions or inactions in our daily lives is what determines our self-worth. Not only will this prevent us from turning into Facebook maniacs — constantly clicking pictures of ourselves and everything that we do in the desperate quest for more ‘Likes’ — but it will also free up a great deal of our time, which is then available for whatever our heart may desire.

Though very few of us will admit to be addicted to Facebook, most of us can agree that we spend more time on it than we would like. To fully utilize the benefits of social networking, just like everything else, one needs to practice the art of balance. Leave a ‘hello’ on the wall of a friend that’s across the miles and indulge in a dessert with a cup of coffee with someone who is only a few minutes away. Update your profile picture for those who cannot see you in person and for the rest…dress to impress.

Let’s be honest…there is no way a ‘Like’ can make you blush the way a real compliment does.

(Photo credit: Finger Community via Shutterstock)

Vibha Dhawan is an engineer during the day, a writer by night and a non-conformist by nature. She enjoys travelling, yoga and writing about life on her blog Curious Lounge. Connect with her via Twitter @curiouslounge.

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Facebook Pages: A Look at the New Timeline Design Features

As with everything it does, Facebook divided opinion recently with its controversial move to a timeline design that according to the social networking giant will ‘tell your life story through photos, friendships and personal milestones’. There are those who really like the new layout, enjoying further levels of customization on their profiles, and viewing the changes as an opportunity to completely control the way their viewed online.

And then there those who utterly loathe Timeline, either because it reminds them too much the Myspace of ol’, suddenly brings to light ill-advised status updates and embarrassing photos from years past, or perhaps because they just can’t deal with change.

Whether we like it or not, Timeline is here, and it’s coming to Facebook Pages too.

If you manage a Facebook Page, you’ve probably noticed the large box looming ominously over said page announcing that from March 30th, all pages will get a new design. Facebook have given us all a few weeks to preview the new design, which comes with the following new features:

Perhaps the biggest and most noticeable difference with the new design is the cover. If you’re not already familiar with this, the cover is a large image you can place across the top of your page.

If you use a Facebook Page to advertise your business, you’ll probably be disappointed by guidelines which insist your cover image must not include promotions, advertisements or any other kind of call to action, including:

Contact information including website addressesAnything encouraging visitors to ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ content, including placing arrows from the cover image to those buttons on your page.Any price or purchase information, so no ‘50% off from mywebsite.com’ or anything like that.

That said, this does give you the chance to be creative with your cover image, selecting something that’s both appealing to the eye and which creates a great first impression.

There’s further bad news if you’re using your page to sell and make money, with the announcement that the Default Landing Tab, which were previously used to direct first-time visitors to a tab other than the Wall, shall be no more.

It’s still possible to point people on Facebook to a tab of your choosing by paying for an advertisement linking to that tab, but to entice people towards that all-important ‘Like’ button without shelling out the cash, you’ll need to find creative ways to do so from within your timeline.

That’s not to say you’re completely doomed, as the new design does offer a couple of handy tools to make your biggest stories stand out. First, there’s the chance to ‘highlight’ a key story, placing it prominently on your page simply by hovering your mouse over the top-right corner of a post and hitting the star button.

If you decide that a post is so important that it should be the first one people see, you can ‘pin’ that post permanently at the top of your page in much the same manner.

Further customization options allow you to rearrange the order in which you display the various tabs on your page. Your Photos tab must stay first in the pecking order, but from there, you can hover over any tab, click the little edit button, and chose to swap your remaining tabs in any order you see fit.

Another major change comes in the form of the new Admin Panel. Those used to locating their admin functions (number of notifications, page insights, etc) on the left-hand side of the page, will now find them in a huge, and I mean huge, box at the top of your page.

This has its benefits.

Everything is laid out nice and simply, with page notifications, most recent ‘Likes’ and a handy graphical display of page insights down the left, and, most useful of all, a messages function on the right. This is a big step for Pages, meaning fans can now send a direct private message to the page, rather than to your personal account, and that you can respond in kind.

If you decide you don’t want this option, it can easily be turned off in your admin settings, easily found in a big drop-down menu marked ‘manage’ at the top of this panel.

The only downer on what is otherwise a great tool is the size. Again, the thing is enormous and is quite the distraction if you’re only interested in getting at your page content. Still, flicking the ‘hide’ button at the top of your panel solves that problem, whilst accessing the panel is as easy as hitting the ‘Admin Panel’ button.

Once you’re comfortable with the big changes to your page, it’s time to play around with some of the smaller features, such as adding milestones to tell your story. However you decide to use it, have fun, get creative and enjoy your timeline. After all, it’s here whether we like it or not.

(Photo credit: past, now, future words in vintage wooden letterpress via Shutterstock)

Chris Skoyles holds various roles in journalism, marketing, digital media and events management. Throughout all these, his one constant obsession is using technology and creative ideas not simply to get things done, but to get them done well. Chris can be found on Twitter and he also blogs about his work, projects and passions at www.chrisskoyles.co.uk

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Can We Really Trust Facebook With Our Online Identity?

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Welcome to our 1,000,000th Facebook fan

The warmest of warm welcomes to our millionth fan on TED’s Facebook page … and all 999,999 who came before. You’re right at the heart of the global TED community, and we really love being able to connect with you every day on Facebook. Collectively you’re an amazing army of idea spreaders. THANK YOU.
– Chris Anderson

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30-Day Facebook Fast

It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook, so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.

Here are some realizations I’ve had as a result of leaving Facebook after 2+ years as an active user. I’m sure some of these realizations can be generalized to social networking as a whole, but I’m going to focus mainly on my personal experience with Facebook. I can’t guarantee you’ll find much overlap between my realizations and your experiences, but I’m sure some people will see similar patterns.

When I dropped Facebook, I noticed that the communication volume in my life dropped significantly. However, I felt no drop in the level of significant and meaningful communication. What I seemed to lose was mostly a lot of noise.

Generally speaking, communicating via Facebook is a shallow experience. You read streams of brief messages from a variety of people, but the messages don’t contain much depth. Most are trivial and mundane. Some are clever or witty. Very little of the information you’ll digest on Facebook is memorable and life-changing. Using Facebook can still give you a feeling of connectedness, but the long-term benefits are negligible.

Facebook essentially gives you the emotional sense that you’re doing something worthwhile (i.e. connecting with people), but when you step back and look at your actions and results from a more objective perspective, it becomes clear that you’re really just spinning your wheels.

Consequently, when I dropped Facebook, I let go of a lot of trivial communication, but I don’t have the sense that anything truly valuable has been lost.

In the weeks after quitting Facebook, I still felt the urge to share certain things with my online “friends”. I’d have a clever thought and feel, I should post this. Or I’d take a really cool photo and think, I ought to share this.

In the past I’d have shared those tidbits out of habit. Then I’d check back in later and read through a few dozen comments people left. And there would be a little emotional reward in having that sense of connection.

But without the option to impulse-share during the past 30 days, I allowed those feelings to come and go without acting on them. I noticed that there was a consequence to sharing in real-time. I wasn’t being very present in the moment. While things were happening around me, I was off thinking about my online posse and what I might wish to share with them.

When I stopped acting on the desire to impulse-share, I become more present to what I was doing in the moment. Instead of being distracted by thoughts of connecting with people at a distance, I did a better job of connecting with the people right in front of me. I felt more immersed in my experiences. That was a subtle change at first, but it feels good.

During the past two years, I’d often feel obligated to share frequent updates with my online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person. If I didn’t post an update for a while, some would complain. If I shared something cool, people would thank me for it.

Now that I’ve been rolling back this conditioning, I can see what a dead end it’s been. I allowed social media to condition me to behave a certain way, but it’s not a conscious choice I would have made otherwise. So it’s nice to regain conscious control over this part of my life.

Even after 30 days, the desire to impulse-share is still there, but it’s growing fainter, replaced by a growing desire to “be here now,” fully present in what’s going on in front of me. I still like sharing, but it’s better to do so thoughtfully instead of impulsively.

Facebook compacts so much communication into a single stream, and this can have a depersonalizing effect. As I continued to use the service to interact with people en masse, I gradually began thinking of my online friends as a network, stream, or blob, as opposed to valuing each person as a unique individual.

When I’d post a status update, who was the intended recipient? Which friend was I updating? In truth I wasn’t sharing with anyone in particular. I was simply sharing with the collective.

If I posted something on a friend’s wall, I wasn’t just communicating with that friend. I was communicating with their posse too. If I used the private messaging feature, it was just one message among dozens. Friends were becoming like interchangeable drones.

One thing that surprised me was just how few of my Facebook friends I actually missed when I left the service. It was difficult to think of my old Facebook friends as individuals. They were all just part of the collective whole. When I unplugged from the collective, it wasn’t like I’d lost any individual friends. I can barely remember the names of all the people I used to connect with there. I’d already lost the ability to distinguish Third of Five from Seven of Nine.

Dropping Facebook wasn’t at all like disconnecting from hundreds of individual friends. I didn’t miss anyone in particular because my Facebook experience was like connecting with a collective. I noticed the absence of the collective when I left, but I didn’t miss it per se.

The exception is that if I knew specific Facebook friends from real life, meaning that we’d met in person and had at least one good conversation together, then I could still see them as individuals. But I don’t need Facebook to stay in touch with those people anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was losing any of these connections by dropping Facebook.

I realize this might sound rather strange, but it’s the best I can explain it. My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active. If I’d only had 50-100 friends, then it might not have felt like I was interacting with a collective.

The feeling that I was interacting with a collective began to feel rather creepy, as you might imagine. I’m glad to be off of Facebook, since I really don’t wish to be assimilated. It’s nice not to feel like there’s an endless stream of other people’s thoughts flowing through my mind all the time. I can hear my own thoughts once again, and they’re a lot more relaxed and coherent.

I’m somewhere between an introvert and an extrovert. As a child I was very introverted. In kindergarten I was the kid who played in the sandbox all by himself. I don’t think I was lonely. I just found sand toys more interesting than people.

As I aged, however, I gradually became more extroverted. Partly this was by choice. I pushed myself to develop my social skills and to embrace what I once avoided.

It’s said that you’re an introvert if you recharge your batteries while being alone, and you’re an extrovert if you recharge in the company of others. That metaphor doesn’t seem to work for me though. I prefer balance, usually by taking turns. If I spend a lot of time alone, I feel a strong desire to go out and be social. But after a very social week, I feel the desire to retreat back to my cave and enjoy more solitary time.

Being active on Facebook had the effect of filling my social bucket. But it was essentially a false fill, like drinking salt water instead of fresh water. Instead of providing a real sense of connection that satisfies, it made me think I was out there being social, but I’d still be “hungry” afterwards. Facebook activity could never recharge my batteries in the way that face to face interaction could.

When I dropped Facebook, I began feeling genuinely more social when I’d go out. Even when running errands, I’d notice myself chatting and joking around with people more often. When I was active on Facebook, I wouldn’t do that as much because I had the false sense that I was being social by interacting with my online posse.

The reality of using Facebook is that you’re just typing and viewing insignificant bits of information on a digital device (computer, cell phone, iStuff, etc).

The next time you use such a service, pause for a moment and do a reality check. What are you actually doing? Who’s with you? How is this advancing your life? What if you do this for 20 more years? What do you expect to gain from it?

You can call it social networking, but it’s not really a social experience if you’re actually alone sitting at a computer. Real socialization is face to face.

There’s a tremendous richness to in-person socialization that just doesn’t translate over the Internet, at least not yet.

A ***hug*** isn’t a real hug. A smiley isn’t a real smile. All you’re doing is pushing buttons.

I’ll go so far as to say that Facebook isn’t social networking. It’s anti-social retreating.

If you want to disagree with me about this, you’ll have say it to my face. If you try to tell me off by typing something on a digital device, you’re only proving me right. Evil, I know.

I can be friendly with people from all walks of life, but when it comes to which people are most compatible as my long-term friends, the Facebook pool isn’t a good fit for the kinds of lasting friendships I really wish to cultivate.

The main issue is the age difference. Most of my Facebook friends were in their 20s. I’m sure that’s a big part of the service’s demographic. It’s also a big part of my blog’s readership, and many of my articles are targeted to the needs of that age group. I already have many friends in their 20s, but if I draw too many of my friends from this pool, it comes with a price.

I can relate to what it’s like to be a 20-something these days, so I’m able to be a friend to someone in that age group, but it’s rare that such people are able to be a good friend to me. They simply don’t have the life experience to give the kind of value I gain from a good friendship.

In your 20s it’s common to do a lot of soul-searching and experimenting to figure out what to do with your life. To get the career part of your life going well, you basically have to figure out 4 things: (1) what you can do to earn a good income, (2) what skills and talents you can develop to a high degree, (3) what you enjoy doing, (4) what you can contribute. It takes some effort to figure these out. Then it takes more effort to massage yourself into the area of intersection, such that you can earn a good income doing what you love and what you’re good at, and thereby make a meaningful contribution too. Most of the 20-somethings I know are still struggling to figure this out, so they can’t be of much help to me in working on what lies beyond this.

I like having younger friends. They help me stay young at heart, and they help me keep my thinking from becoming stale. Their needs and concerns provide me with an endless supply of ideas. But I also need older, more experienced friends, especially people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. I gain so much from their wisdom and knowledge. Having the right balance is key. Otherwise you become socially stagnant, and the sparkle drains from your social life. Instead of appreciating your friends, you start taking them for granted. I noticed I was beginning to fall into this trap last year, so I knew it was time to shuffle the deck and rebalance this part of my life.

The problem with Facebook is that it greatly unbalanced the social part of my life, skewing it in the direction of spending lots of time with people nearly half my age. This dragged my thinking backwards in terms of maturity. When I dropped Facebook, my social life began to rebalance itself automatically. This is causing other positive ripples as well. Many problems are easier to solve when you approach them with a 40-something’s discipline or a 50-something’s patience as opposed to a 20-something’s youthful energy.

Ask yourself what your life would be like if 80-90% of your social interactions were with people roughly half your age. Can you see how that might unbalance your social life?

For many years this has been a challenging part of my life to balance. It took a while to recognize and accept that my online “friends” and my best in-person friends come from different pools and move in different circles.

Most of my Facebook “friends” wouldn’t have been very compatible as in-person friends. We wouldn’t have had enough in common to develop a particularly deep friendship, and the interactions would have been too unbalanced. So it seems odd to refer to them as friends in the same way I’d refer to my in-person friends.

I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t just fill up my social bucket with an endless supply of 20-something friends and expect good results, even if they’re very intelligent, growth-oriented, open-hearted 20-somethings. This kind of imbalance happens by default when I leave too many doors and windows open since the bulk of my online readership is in their 20s. If I allow too many of my typical readers to become my friends, my social life becomes unbalanced and stagnant, even as it maintains the illusion of freshness. It took a long time to recognize that this was happening.

In order to rebalance this part of my life, I’ve had to deliberately close some of those accessible avenues, such that I can spend more time connecting with people who can add serious value to my life and help me keep growing (peers, mentors, etc). I like having some 20-something friends, but I can’t have hundreds of them. So that’s one reason Facebook really had to go — using Facebook was a lame attempt on my part to expect that my peers would come from the same pool as my readers.

This is probably obvious, but the Facebook “friends” that you’ll interact with most frequently will tend to be those who are the most addicted. They post more status updates and comments because they spend a lot of time on the service. So you end up giving the most attention to those who are the greatest addicts.

In short, you end up spending the most time interacting with the people who are the worst influences — highly unproductive people who don’t value their time. This can have many adverse effects, such as causing you to become more addicted to the service and to feel the urge to post more often just for the sake of posting.

If your strongest connections on Facebook are the most addicted, how is that going to influence you over time? The closer you become with those people, the more you’ll get sucked into spending more time on the service.

After I left Facebook, I asked myself, Should I really be giving so much attention to the greatest social networking addicts?

While even the biggest addicts can be very intelligent, helpful, and growth-oriented, their addiction tends to sap their ambition, causing them to make little forward progress in life. It should come as no surprise that many of these people are financially stagnant. It’s hard to improve your finances when you devote so much time to non-income generating activities each day.

When I dropped Facebook, I also dropped off the radar of some of the biggest social networking addicts. I’m no longer subject to their influence, which was probably stronger than I’d care to admit. Breaking free of this cycle was a wise choice. I should have done it sooner.

Social networking makes it easy to become socially lazy. With a few clicks, you can delude yourself into thinking you have an active social life.

But is that the real story? Are you enjoying some intelligent face time with these friends? Or are you merely exchanging witty banter? Do you deeply value these friendships? Are you having the social experiences you desire? Or are you just wasting time clicking and typing and telling yourself you’re being social?

What else could you be doing instead of social networking?

You could go dancing or see a show with your boyfriend or girlfriend. No one special in your life? Wonder why… A person with halfway decent social skills can change that in a day. Has the Internet become your social hiding place? Does the thought of going outside and socializing with strangers make you anxious? If so, you can overcome that weakness with practice.

You could have a nice chat with a wealthy mentor about how to improve your finances. No wealthy friends? Think you’re going to meet them on Facebook?

It’s a good idea to pause and take a look at your social results. Has social networking transformed your life for the better? Has it helped bring empowering relationships, valuable contacts, and intelligent mentors into your life? Or does it leave you drifting in a sea of social drifters?

I found that spending more time on Facebook didn’t produce much value for me socially. I did make some interesting contacts now and then, but it wasn’t worth the time spent.

It’s true that in-person networking is more challenging. If your social skills are weak, you can pretend to be a social butterfly online just by throwing a lot of time at it. But you’re still going to be limited in the long run by your ability to connect with people face to face. Make sure you don’t let your social skills atrophy to the point where you end up spending more and more time alone, vainly trying to feed the illusion that you have a real social life.

Be sure to keep challenging yourself socially. If you only do what’s easy, you’ll grow weaker with each passing year.

I know there’s a great deal of hype about the business value of social networking. Much of that hype is circulated by those who are trying to make money from it. Be wary of taking advice about gold from those who make a living selling picks and shovels.

From a business standpoint, one supposed benefit of social networking is that it can raise your visibility. Raising your visibility is great. If you’re more visible (among the right people), you can attract more business. That part is all good.

But not all visibility-raising methods are the same. If you use Facebook to raise your visibility, it comes with a hefty price. As you raise your visibility, you also increase your accessibility.

For example, if you have a Facebook page, then you also have an inbox. At this time Facebook makes it impossible to disable the inbox. People can email you there. People I’d never met would email me on Facebook each day. Why? Because they could. Facebook made it easy for them to do so. They didn’t need my permission. Facebook would even let non-friends email me whenever they felt like it. Maybe that’s a bug, but that’s how it worked from my perspective.

If you have a Facebook page with a wall on it, then people can post comments on your wall. If you have a fan page, someone can “like” your fan page, spam your wall, and then “unlike” your fan page, and it’s impossible to ban them from repeated abuse. You just have to deal with it.

At low numbers, more accessibility isn’t so bad. Maybe you’d like the chance to communicate with more people. That’s all fine.

At higher numbers, the visibility-accessibility linkage becomes untenable. The more visible you are on Facebook, the more people have access to interact with you in some way, whether it’s by sending you private messages, posting messages on your wall, or inviting you to events and groups. Beyond a certain point, this kind of contact becomes impractical to deal with in any meaningful way.

I like that Facebook may have helped to increase my visibility by introducing people to my work who might otherwise never have learned about it. However, the price tag for that gain in visibility is a corresponding increase in accessibility. That price turned out to be way too high for me. I like helping people, but I can’t serve as a personal friend and therapist to thousands of individuals. That isn’t a sustainable way for me to contribute.

When I dropped Facebook, I breathed a major sigh of relief. In a way I’m still sighing 30 days later. It really is a great relief not to be so accessible anymore. I finally feel like I have the space to think about what I desire to contribute of my own accord instead of feeling overwhelmed with an endless flood of requests from others. The visibility gains that Facebook provides just aren’t worth the price. There are much easier and more effective ways to build visibility that don’t yield an accessibility penalty, such as doing interviews.

As for my Twitter account, the jury’s still out, but for now I’m still using it.

Twitter doesn’t create the same accessibility problem because by following zero people there, I’m not forced to have an inbox on the service. Even if I did have an inbox, it wouldn’t be bad because people could only send 140-character messages. But I find it best not to have an inbox there at all, so I never need to worry about people expecting me to reply to their direct messages. A few people apparently consider it poor Twitter etiquette to have thousands of followers and not follow anyone back. I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Occasionally I’ll skim through the public messages that people address to me, especially if I posted a question for feedback purposes, but I normally don’t pay much attention to the @stevepavlina replies since they’re mostly re-tweets of my own stuff. So if you tried to get my attention by publicly posting a message to me on Twitter, there’s a good chance I never saw it.

For now I’m okay using Twitter for posting broadcast-style messages because Twitter doesn’t force upon me the scaling headaches that Facebook does. If I double my Twitter followers, the service doesn’t require me to spend any more time there to keep my account tidy.

I nuked my Linkedin account at the same time I left Facebook. Linkedin is supposed to be a business networking service, and I had about 350 contacts there, but I always found that service utterly useless, so it was a no-brainer to dump it.

If you have any doubts about your own Facebook usage, I highly recommend you to try a 30-day Facebook fast.

It’s easy to do this because Facebook lets you (temporarily or permanently) deactivate your account without deleting your data. So if you decide you want to go back to using it later, you can always log back in again, and everything can be restored with a few clicks, including your wall, photos, etc.

As for the how-to, all you do is login to your Facebook account, and click Account -> Account Settings. Then at the bottom of that page, click “deactivate.” Follow the instructions from there. This won’t delete your data, but it will take your profile offline. You’ll become invisible on the service. To restore it later, just login again and click a similar link to bring it back.

If you really want to stay in touch with certain people from Facebook who don’t already have an alternate means of contacting you, you can send them a private message before you deactivate your account to let them know how to reach you during your hiatus.

I’m a big advocate of testing. If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of its role in your life. In my case it was obvious within a few days that the benefits I got from using it weren’t worth the effort, but there were other subtleties I didn’t notice until weeks later.

This is your life. It’s up to you to ensure that you’re getting good value from your online activities. Don’t just go through the motions because you’ve been conditioned by some service to behave a certain way.

As for myself, I’m sure it’s obvious that I have no plans to return to Facebook. Resistance is NOT futile.

*** hugs ***

If you've found this website helpful, please click the Donate button. I'm grateful for your support.This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Balance, People Skills, Productivity, Relationships, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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30-Day Facebook Fast

It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook, so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.

Here are some realizations I’ve had as a result of leaving Facebook after 2+ years as an active user. I’m sure some of these realizations can be generalized to social networking as a whole, but I’m going to focus mainly on my personal experience with Facebook. I can’t guarantee you’ll find much overlap between my realizations and your experiences, but I’m sure some people will see similar patterns.

When I dropped Facebook, I noticed that the communication volume in my life dropped significantly. However, I felt no drop in the level of significant and meaningful communication. What I seemed to lose was mostly a lot of noise.

Generally speaking, communicating via Facebook is a shallow experience. You read streams of brief messages from a variety of people, but the messages don’t contain much depth. Most are trivial and mundane. Some are clever or witty. Very little of the information you’ll digest on Facebook is memorable and life-changing. Using Facebook can still give you a feeling of connectedness, but the long-term benefits are negligible.

Facebook essentially gives you the emotional sense that you’re doing something worthwhile (i.e. connecting with people), but when you step back and look at your actions and results from a more objective perspective, it becomes clear that you’re really just spinning your wheels.

Consequently, when I dropped Facebook, I let go of a lot of trivial communication, but I don’t have the sense that anything truly valuable has been lost.

In the weeks after quitting Facebook, I still felt the urge to share certain things with my online “friends”. I’d have a clever thought and feel, I should post this. Or I’d take a really cool photo and think, I ought to share this.

In the past I’d have shared those tidbits out of habit. Then I’d check back in later and read through a few dozen comments people left. And there would be a little emotional reward in having that sense of connection.

But without the option to impulse-share during the past 30 days, I allowed those feelings to come and go without acting on them. I noticed that there was a consequence to sharing in real-time. I wasn’t being very present in the moment. While things were happening around me, I was off thinking about my online posse and what I might wish to share with them.

When I stopped acting on the desire to impulse-share, I become more present to what I was doing in the moment. Instead of being distracted by thoughts of connecting with people at a distance, I did a better job of connecting with the people right in front of me. I felt more immersed in my experiences. That was a subtle change at first, but it feels good.

During the past two years, I’d often feel obligated to share frequent updates with my online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person. If I didn’t post an update for a while, some would complain. If I shared something cool, people would thank me for it.

Now that I’ve been rolling back this conditioning, I can see what a dead end it’s been. I allowed social media to condition me to behave a certain way, but it’s not a conscious choice I would have made otherwise. So it’s nice to regain conscious control over this part of my life.

Even after 30 days, the desire to impulse-share is still there, but it’s growing fainter, replaced by a growing desire to “be here now,” fully present in what’s going on in front of me. I still like sharing, but it’s better to do so thoughtfully instead of impulsively.

Facebook compacts so much communication into a single stream, and this can have a depersonalizing effect. As I continued to use the service to interact with people en masse, I gradually began thinking of my online friends as a network, stream, or blob, as opposed to valuing each person as a unique individual.

When I’d post a status update, who was the intended recipient? Which friend was I updating? In truth I wasn’t sharing with anyone in particular. I was simply sharing with the collective.

If I posted something on a friend’s wall, I wasn’t just communicating with that friend. I was communicating with their posse too. If I used the private messaging feature, it was just one message among dozens. Friends were becoming like interchangeable drones.

One thing that surprised me was just how few of my Facebook friends I actually missed when I left the service. It was difficult to think of my old Facebook friends as individuals. They were all just part of the collective whole. When I unplugged from the collective, it wasn’t like I’d lost any individual friends. I can barely remember the names of all the people I used to connect with there. I’d already lost the ability to distinguish Third of Five from Seven of Nine.

Dropping Facebook wasn’t at all like disconnecting from hundreds of individual friends. I didn’t miss anyone in particular because my Facebook experience was like connecting with a collective. I noticed the absence of the collective when I left, but I didn’t miss it per se.

The exception is that if I knew specific Facebook friends from real life, meaning that we’d met in person and had at least one good conversation together, then I could still see them as individuals. But I don’t need Facebook to stay in touch with those people anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was losing any of these connections by dropping Facebook.

I realize this might sound rather strange, but it’s the best I can explain it. My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active. If I’d only had 50-100 friends, then it might not have felt like I was interacting with a collective.

The feeling that I was interacting with a collective began to feel rather creepy, as you might imagine. I’m glad to be off of Facebook, since I really don’t wish to be assimilated. It’s nice not to feel like there’s an endless stream of other people’s thoughts flowing through my mind all the time. I can hear my own thoughts once again, and they’re a lot more relaxed and coherent.

I’m somewhere between an introvert and an extrovert. As a child I was very introverted. In kindergarten I was the kid who played in the sandbox all by himself. I don’t think I was lonely. I just found sand toys more interesting than people.

As I aged, however, I gradually became more extroverted. Partly this was by choice. I pushed myself to develop my social skills and to embrace what I once avoided.

It’s said that you’re an introvert if you recharge your batteries while being alone, and you’re an extrovert if you recharge in the company of others. That metaphor doesn’t seem to work for me though. I prefer balance, usually by taking turns. If I spend a lot of time alone, I feel a strong desire to go out and be social. But after a very social week, I feel the desire to retreat back to my cave and enjoy more solitary time.

Being active on Facebook had the effect of filling my social bucket. But it was essentially a false fill, like drinking salt water instead of fresh water. Instead of providing a real sense of connection that satisfies, it made me think I was out there being social, but I’d still be “hungry” afterwards. Facebook activity could never recharge my batteries in the way that face to face interaction could.

When I dropped Facebook, I began feeling genuinely more social when I’d go out. Even when running errands, I’d notice myself chatting and joking around with people more often. When I was active on Facebook, I wouldn’t do that as much because I had the false sense that I was being social by interacting with my online posse.

The reality of using Facebook is that you’re just typing and viewing insignificant bits of information on a digital device (computer, cell phone, iStuff, etc).

The next time you use such a service, pause for a moment and do a reality check. What are you actually doing? Who’s with you? How is this advancing your life? What if you do this for 20 more years? What do you expect to gain from it?

You can call it social networking, but it’s not really a social experience if you’re actually alone sitting at a computer. Real socialization is face to face.

There’s a tremendous richness to in-person socialization that just doesn’t translate over the Internet, at least not yet.

A ***hug*** isn’t a real hug. A smiley isn’t a real smile. All you’re doing is pushing buttons.

I’ll go so far as to say that Facebook isn’t social networking. It’s anti-social retreating.

If you want to disagree with me about this, you’ll have say it to my face. If you try to tell me off by typing something on a digital device, you’re only proving me right. Evil, I know.

I can be friendly with people from all walks of life, but when it comes to which people are most compatible as my long-term friends, the Facebook pool isn’t a good fit for the kinds of lasting friendships I really wish to cultivate.

The main issue is the age difference. Most of my Facebook friends were in their 20s. I’m sure that’s a big part of the service’s demographic. It’s also a big part of my blog’s readership, and many of my articles are targeted to the needs of that age group. I already have many friends in their 20s, but if I draw too many of my friends from this pool, it comes with a price.

I can relate to what it’s like to be a 20-something these days, so I’m able to be a friend to someone in that age group, but it’s rare that such people are able to be a good friend to me. They simply don’t have the life experience to give the kind of value I gain from a good friendship.

In your 20s it’s common to do a lot of soul-searching and experimenting to figure out what to do with your life. To get the career part of your life going well, you basically have to figure out 4 things: (1) what you can do to earn a good income, (2) what skills and talents you can develop to a high degree, (3) what you enjoy doing, (4) what you can contribute. It takes some effort to figure these out. Then it takes more effort to massage yourself into the area of intersection, such that you can earn a good income doing what you love and what you’re good at, and thereby make a meaningful contribution too. Most of the 20-somethings I know are still struggling to figure this out, so they can’t be of much help to me in working on what lies beyond this.

I like having younger friends. They help me stay young at heart, and they help me keep my thinking from becoming stale. Their needs and concerns provide me with an endless supply of ideas. But I also need older, more experienced friends, especially people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. I gain so much from their wisdom and knowledge. Having the right balance is key. Otherwise you become socially stagnant, and the sparkle drains from your social life. Instead of appreciating your friends, you start taking them for granted. I noticed I was beginning to fall into this trap last year, so I knew it was time to shuffle the deck and rebalance this part of my life.

The problem with Facebook is that it greatly unbalanced the social part of my life, skewing it in the direction of spending lots of time with people nearly half my age. This dragged my thinking backwards in terms of maturity. When I dropped Facebook, my social life began to rebalance itself automatically. This is causing other positive ripples as well. Many problems are easier to solve when you approach them with a 40-something’s discipline or a 50-something’s patience as opposed to a 20-something’s youthful energy.

Ask yourself what your life would be like if 80-90% of your social interactions were with people roughly half your age. Can you see how that might unbalance your social life?

For many years this has been a challenging part of my life to balance. It took a while to recognize and accept that my online “friends” and my best in-person friends come from different pools and move in different circles.

Most of my Facebook “friends” wouldn’t have been very compatible as in-person friends. We wouldn’t have had enough in common to develop a particularly deep friendship, and the interactions would have been too unbalanced. So it seems odd to refer to them as friends in the same way I’d refer to my in-person friends.

I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t just fill up my social bucket with an endless supply of 20-something friends and expect good results, even if they’re very intelligent, growth-oriented, open-hearted 20-somethings. This kind of imbalance happens by default when I leave too many doors and windows open since the bulk of my online readership is in their 20s. If I allow too many of my typical readers to become my friends, my social life becomes unbalanced and stagnant, even as it maintains the illusion of freshness. It took a long time to recognize that this was happening.

In order to rebalance this part of my life, I’ve had to deliberately close some of those accessible avenues, such that I can spend more time connecting with people who can add serious value to my life and help me keep growing (peers, mentors, etc). I like having some 20-something friends, but I can’t have hundreds of them. So that’s one reason Facebook really had to go — using Facebook was a lame attempt on my part to expect that my peers would come from the same pool as my readers.

This is probably obvious, but the Facebook “friends” that you’ll interact with most frequently will tend to be those who are the most addicted. They post more status updates and comments because they spend a lot of time on the service. So you end up giving the most attention to those who are the greatest addicts.

In short, you end up spending the most time interacting with the people who are the worst influences — highly unproductive people who don’t value their time. This can have many adverse effects, such as causing you to become more addicted to the service and to feel the urge to post more often just for the sake of posting.

If your strongest connections on Facebook are the most addicted, how is that going to influence you over time? The closer you become with those people, the more you’ll get sucked into spending more time on the service.

After I left Facebook, I asked myself, Should I really be giving so much attention to the greatest social networking addicts?

While even the biggest addicts can be very intelligent, helpful, and growth-oriented, their addiction tends to sap their ambition, causing them to make little forward progress in life. It should come as no surprise that many of these people are financially stagnant. It’s hard to improve your finances when you devote so much time to non-income generating activities each day.

When I dropped Facebook, I also dropped off the radar of some of the biggest social networking addicts. I’m no longer subject to their influence, which was probably stronger than I’d care to admit. Breaking free of this cycle was a wise choice. I should have done it sooner.

Social networking makes it easy to become socially lazy. With a few clicks, you can delude yourself into thinking you have an active social life.

But is that the real story? Are you enjoying some intelligent face time with these friends? Or are you merely exchanging witty banter? Do you deeply value these friendships? Are you having the social experiences you desire? Or are you just wasting time clicking and typing and telling yourself you’re being social?

What else could you be doing instead of social networking?

You could go dancing or see a show with your boyfriend or girlfriend. No one special in your life? Wonder why… A person with halfway decent social skills can change that in a day. Has the Internet become your social hiding place? Does the thought of going outside and socializing with strangers make you anxious? If so, you can overcome that weakness with practice.

You could have a nice chat with a wealthy mentor about how to improve your finances. No wealthy friends? Think you’re going to meet them on Facebook?

It’s a good idea to pause and take a look at your social results. Has social networking transformed your life for the better? Has it helped bring empowering relationships, valuable contacts, and intelligent mentors into your life? Or does it leave you drifting in a sea of social drifters?

I found that spending more time on Facebook didn’t produce much value for me socially. I did make some interesting contacts now and then, but it wasn’t worth the time spent.

It’s true that in-person networking is more challenging. If your social skills are weak, you can pretend to be a social butterfly online just by throwing a lot of time at it. But you’re still going to be limited in the long run by your ability to connect with people face to face. Make sure you don’t let your social skills atrophy to the point where you end up spending more and more time alone, vainly trying to feed the illusion that you have a real social life.

Be sure to keep challenging yourself socially. If you only do what’s easy, you’ll grow weaker with each passing year.

I know there’s a great deal of hype about the business value of social networking. Much of that hype is circulated by those who are trying to make money from it. Be wary of taking advice about gold from those who make a living selling picks and shovels.

From a business standpoint, one supposed benefit of social networking is that it can raise your visibility. Raising your visibility is great. If you’re more visible (among the right people), you can attract more business. That part is all good.

But not all visibility-raising methods are the same. If you use Facebook to raise your visibility, it comes with a hefty price. As you raise your visibility, you also increase your accessibility.

For example, if you have a Facebook page, then you also have an inbox. At this time Facebook makes it impossible to disable the inbox. People can email you there. People I’d never met would email me on Facebook each day. Why? Because they could. Facebook made it easy for them to do so. They didn’t need my permission. Facebook would even let non-friends email me whenever they felt like it. Maybe that’s a bug, but that’s how it worked from my perspective.

If you have a Facebook page with a wall on it, then people can post comments on your wall. If you have a fan page, someone can “like” your fan page, spam your wall, and then “unlike” your fan page, and it’s impossible to ban them from repeated abuse. You just have to deal with it.

At low numbers, more accessibility isn’t so bad. Maybe you’d like the chance to communicate with more people. That’s all fine.

At higher numbers, the visibility-accessibility linkage becomes untenable. The more visible you are on Facebook, the more people have access to interact with you in some way, whether it’s by sending you private messages, posting messages on your wall, or inviting you to events and groups. Beyond a certain point, this kind of contact becomes impractical to deal with in any meaningful way.

I like that Facebook may have helped to increase my visibility by introducing people to my work who might otherwise never have learned about it. However, the price tag for that gain in visibility is a corresponding increase in accessibility. That price turned out to be way too high for me. I like helping people, but I can’t serve as a personal friend and therapist to thousands of individuals. That isn’t a sustainable way for me to contribute.

When I dropped Facebook, I breathed a major sigh of relief. In a way I’m still sighing 30 days later. It really is a great relief not to be so accessible anymore. I finally feel like I have the space to think about what I desire to contribute of my own accord instead of feeling overwhelmed with an endless flood of requests from others. The visibility gains that Facebook provides just aren’t worth the price. There are much easier and more effective ways to build visibility that don’t yield an accessibility penalty, such as doing interviews.

As for my Twitter account, the jury’s still out, but for now I’m still using it.

Twitter doesn’t create the same accessibility problem because by following zero people there, I’m not forced to have an inbox on the service. Even if I did have an inbox, it wouldn’t be bad because people could only send 140-character messages. But I find it best not to have an inbox there at all, so I never need to worry about people expecting me to reply to their direct messages. A few people apparently consider it poor Twitter etiquette to have thousands of followers and not follow anyone back. I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Occasionally I’ll skim through the public messages that people address to me, especially if I posted a question for feedback purposes, but I normally don’t pay much attention to the @stevepavlina replies since they’re mostly re-tweets of my own stuff. So if you tried to get my attention by publicly posting a message to me on Twitter, there’s a good chance I never saw it.

For now I’m okay using Twitter for posting broadcast-style messages because Twitter doesn’t force upon me the scaling headaches that Facebook does. If I double my Twitter followers, the service doesn’t require me to spend any more time there to keep my account tidy.

I nuked my Linkedin account at the same time I left Facebook. Linkedin is supposed to be a business networking service, and I had about 350 contacts there, but I always found that service utterly useless, so it was a no-brainer to dump it.

If you have any doubts about your own Facebook usage, I highly recommend you to try a 30-day Facebook fast.

It’s easy to do this because Facebook lets you (temporarily or permanently) deactivate your account without deleting your data. So if you decide you want to go back to using it later, you can always log back in again, and everything can be restored with a few clicks, including your wall, photos, etc.

As for the how-to, all you do is login to your Facebook account, and click Account -> Account Settings. Then at the bottom of that page, click “deactivate.” Follow the instructions from there. This won’t delete your data, but it will take your profile offline. You’ll become invisible on the service. To restore it later, just login again and click a similar link to bring it back.

If you really want to stay in touch with certain people from Facebook who don’t already have an alternate means of contacting you, you can send them a private message before you deactivate your account to let them know how to reach you during your hiatus.

I’m a big advocate of testing. If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of its role in your life. In my case it was obvious within a few days that the benefits I got from using it weren’t worth the effort, but there were other subtleties I didn’t notice until weeks later.

This is your life. It’s up to you to ensure that you’re getting good value from your online activities. Don’t just go through the motions because you’ve been conditioned by some service to behave a certain way.

As for myself, I’m sure it’s obvious that I have no plans to return to Facebook. Resistance is NOT futile.

*** hugs ***

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Leaving Facebook

Today I decided to stop using Facebook. I’ve already turned off both my personal page and my fan page.

I’ve been pretty active on Facebook in the past, and I have many friends who use the service. My personal page was maxed out at 5K friends for more than a year, and my fan page had just over 3300 fans. So it may seem a little surprising that I’d up and drop the service altogether.

There are a number of reasons I decided to do this, so let me ’splain.

The main reason is that I dislike the way certain features on Facebook are designed and implemented. They may work okay for most users, but they aren’t a good match for someone in my shoes. Over time I felt like the system was becoming increasingly abusive in the way it treats me as a user, largely due to what I consider to be serious design flaws.

Obviously my situation isn’t like that of the typical Facebook user since I already had a substantial online following before I started using Facebook. It didn’t take long for my personal account to max out on friends. Once I got close to that limit, I lost the ability to send out new friend requests. So that feature hasn’t been available to me for more than a year. Facebook kept adding new incoming friend requests to a waiting list. It just left those requests in limbo, but I couldn’t do anything about that.

I thought that a solution would be to add a fan page, which I did in September, but then I ended up with two pages. That’s been awkward to maintain, especially since each type of page is administered differently. Also, Facebook’s latest update really broke the way fan pages can be administered, making it more trouble than it’s worth. I can either spend extra time on the admin side, let the page quality go down the drain, or drop it altogether. I choose the latter.

The biggest overall issue is that Facebook’s admin tools absolutely suck when you have a very well-known profile there. I think all of these problems are fixable from a design and programming perspective, but instead of fixing them, Facebook seems to break more things as time goes on.

My Facebook message inbox would receive daily spam, even from people I’ve unfriended and blocked, and there’s no way to prevent it. I disabled every possible email notification that Facebook might send me, but it’s still very lame to visit my Facebook page, see notification that I have several new messages, and all of them are spam from people I don’t know. This problem was minimal when I started using Facebook, but the longer I’ve been a member, the worse it became. Having another spammed inbox degrades the quality of the service a lot. When it got to the point where most of my Facebook messages were spam, I began to think, “Why bother with this?”

And of course you can’t disable their private messaging feature, which would have been my preference from the get-go. I don’t need another email inbox anyway. If you have a personal account on Facebook, then people can message you there, and you have to go to Facebook to reply. Even if I set it so that only friends can message me (the most restrictive setting they offer), it doesn’t work. For whatever reason, people could still spam me on Facebook whether we were friends or not.

I’d also receive countless event invitations from people I don’t know, in cities where I don’t reside, and there’s no way to block them. This is really lame. If given the choice, I’d disable event invites altogether, but of course they don’t provide such a setting. Event spam is apparently mandatory.

People tag me in random photos as a way of spamming my wall. If I don’t manually delete those, my photo section will eventually fill up with spammed photos. No way to prevent this.

People add me to groups without my permission, and I can’t prevent it. I can only manually unsubscribe after the fact.

There are numerous other forms of abuse employed by Internet marketers, spammers, born again nutters, and people who simply want to game the system. In my opinion, all of these problems could be solved with some moderately skilled programming.

And that’s just on the personal page side.

The best word I can use to describe Facebook’s fan page administration is “broken.” There are so many complaints about it from other fan page admins, but it seems like Facebook is ignoring these problems and perhaps even making things worse on purpose. Due to their business model, Facebook can actually make more money if they break things a certain way.

For example, in their latest “update”, Facebook removed the ability for fan page admins to block certain users from posting comments on their walls. So a spammer or troll can post comment spam on your wall, and for all practical purposes, you can’t prevent it. You can manually delete their posts after the fact, but they can just come back and post more.

A common trick used by spammers is to “like” your fan page, spam it, and then “unlike” your page. It appears that they can do this as much as they want, and you can’t prevent it. There’s no way to block them.

As a programmer myself, I can’t fathom that it would take much technical and design effort to address these issues, and Facebook is flooded with complaints from users begging them to fix these headaches. From my perspective as a Facebook user with a very active personal page and fan page, I can’t help but get the impression that Facebook deliberately wants to make some basic admin tasks (like blocking spammers) difficult or impossible in order to compel you to spend more time on the site. There doesn’t seem to be any other logical reason for these glaring design flaws that I can comprehend, other than pure incompetence, and based on their success in other areas, it seems more likely that these choices are deliberate.

I imagine that most Facebook users won’t encounter these problems, at least not to the degree that I did. They’re partly a problem of scale. The more people who know you on Facebook, the worse these problems become.

Given that Facebook’s business model is based on getting you to spend more time on their site, effectively addicting you to it, and given what I’ve seen from maintaining very active pages on their site, it looks to me like these “bugs” are intentional. For most users they’ll create only very minor headaches, probably not enough to motivate someone to leave the service but enough to produce a little extra gain for Facebook. An occasional spam message from a non-friend looks like a glitch or an accident if it only happens once or twice a year, but it brings you back to their site to deal with it, where you’ll be exposed to more ad impressions that generate revenue for Facebook. Multiply these seemingly infrequent problems by 500 million users, and something looks very fishy.

Either that, or they have some really incompetent interface designers and/or programmers, and I have a harder time believing that to be the case. Surely someone on their team is aware of all the complaints and requests to fix the broken elements. So why do they seem to ignore what appear to be such glaring (and fixable) problems?

I thought that Facebook would be an interesting place to share inspirational messages and build more community around growth-oriented people. But the current implementation of Facebook can’t handle the way I’ve been trying to use it without creating more headaches than it’s worth, and their momentum appears to be headed in the wrong direction for me to expect that these problems would be fixed anytime soon.

So I’ve crossed the threshold where Facebook’s value isn’t worth the hassle to use it. I concluded that the best choice was to simply drop the service altogether and invest my time elsewhere.

If you were one of the people who actively connected with me on Facebook and you’re disappointed by this decision, I’m sorry about that. Perhaps it’s for the best though.

From a subjective perspective, I’m not particularly disappointed. I’ve been wanting to spend less time online and more time connecting with people in person, so these problems may simply be part of the way that desire manifested.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 3rd, 2011 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Balance, Relationships, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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