Is the Facebook craze over?

I'm one of those strange people who have never liked Facebook at all. I did have an account on it for a while but found it to be just too much hassle to be bothered with.

Firstly, the thing was bloody complicated as hell. It's bad enough having to learn the latest Windows operating system and other upgrades that come along, but to spend 5 minutes at a time trying to figure out how to do something on Facebook was just bullshit. And it didn't seem to get better the more time I was on it. Maybe just me but I couldn't see any point bothering with it when if someone wanted to contact me just to send an email.

Then the people that found me on it weren't people I wanted to be found by. There was a period when suddenly my account was swamped with all these new "friends" that were from that dreadful church I was in many eons ago, with stuff plastered on their walls that would appear on mine; things like gay hating religious bigotry suddenly started showing up on my account as friends posts. Ugh. In the end I had a mass purge and deleted these new Facebook invaders.

So I was pretty much left with just people on my facebook friends list that I could simply email anyway if I wanted to say hi. At that point I gave up on it, but still left the account open. It was virtually un-used for about a year I suppose, until that nut bag from Germany here on a bridging visa sent me a full on death threat through facebook (which was followed through court with an AVO against him). That was it, I disabled the account and want nothing more to do with it.

Looks like I'm not the only one getting the shits with facebook. Even Australians who use it are getting over it.

A quantitative survey we conducted of 753 Australian Facebook users (selected to represent the general population) tells the story even more succinctly. Thirty-one per cent of Australian Facebook users feel that they spend too much time on the site. This number doubled to 61 per cent among those aged between 18 and 29. 

Anyone with a Facebook account could relate to these figures (c'mon, we've all watched the hours spent on Facebook slip by with a pang of guilt at ignoring the kids/washing/work/study/sleep) but what surprised even us was that this feeling of burden was driving users to consider opting out altogether. Forty-three per cent of users have thought about closing their accounts, with slightly more - 47 per cent - of those aged between 18 and 29 admitting to considering disliking Facebook for good. Read more

Other than it being a complete waste of time fucking around on it, there's also the security issues. People have their whole lives on facebook, along with their real names and fuck knows what else. That sort of information could be massively useful for some gov or corporation wanting to know what's going on with an entire population. A gov could use that info to slant it's election campaign to strike a chord with voters, or a corporation could use it to find out what people want to buy. There's been some pretty scaring stuff in the last year or so relating to the cavalier nature of Facebooks attitude to information privacy.

Overall, I'd be glad to see the thing become much less powerful. All that information in one place has got to be bad.