After nearly a month of no more Facebook...

First, a brief shout out to EROCx1 for following this pseudo-blog of mine, the only one of my former Facebook friends to do so.

It's been very interesting observing the sort of "hole" in my day-to-day since leaving FB nearly a month ago. My departure became official on May 15th, which was the "date of no return" after which I would no longer be able to restore my terminated account.

Although I had announced my intentions around deleting my account a couple weeks ahead of time, I've since learned that some people were unaware of my intentions, and that the less-sophisticated among them assumed they had been un-friended. This was a risk I was willing to take, obviously. I just figured that anyone close enough to me to matter would (eventually) discover what had happened.

Aside from all of that, I have been suffering some loss in the sense that a couple good "in real life" friends are very active on FB, and it was the primary method for me to keep abreast with the events in their lives. Consequently, I have been trying to adjust to the new situation.

These changes offer me the opportunity to restructure how i socialize online, while honoring my major concerns around services like Facebook. I currently envision being much more involved in blogging and the communities associated with the blog services I use. This is my most "public" blog, the one which will be the most "safe for work." There may be other blogs which I never mentioned on FB (unlike this one--which I had explicitly listed within my "info" on Facebook) that I now have more time to develop and enioy.

So it's been a bit of a mixed bag. I am committed to my decision to leave; it was the right thing for me to do on multiple levels. But I'm also feeling a bit "cut off" from some of the people I care about, and I need to sort out how best to remedy that.

In closing, I'd like to share a couple resources which helped inspire my decision to leave Facebook. A very interesting talk by Eben Moglen called Freedom in the Cloud became a sort of tipping point for me--despite the fact that it took me more than a year to leave FB after being inspired to do so. Another interesting article drew attention to some discomfort I had been experiencing with the social climate of FB from the very beginning (I opened my account in 2006, but didn't become active until 2008), and concerns the idea of "Faux Friends."

May you enjoy a beautiful now!