I’ve been thinking about getting the hell off Facebook for awhile, but something always comes up. That’s the thing with Facebook, there’s always another friend to add, or another app to block. Could we all just please poke each other every once in a while and keep it at that?

As you may have noticed I’m pretty active on Twitter, I like the simplicity of it and the fact that the service doesn’t try to sell me anything. Facebook, on the other hand, steals a bit from Twitter, a bit from Flickr, adds basic email and chat functions, wraps it in a fenced community and throws more commercials at you than you would tolerate anywhere else.

It’s like Grand fucking Central. And I’m just getting sick of it. I don’t care about the speculated, possible, doomsayer privacy issues. For Facebook to actually harvest and abuse people’s personal information and uploaded photos would be such a breach of confidence that the service wouldn’t recover.

So here you go Facebook. Take my pictures, I have them in better resolution on backup. And my IP rights are constitutionally secured, even in that banana republic where your servers are kept. I’m more worried about all the time I wasted, and could continue to waste if I don’t shake the habit now. I’m pretty sure Facebook owes me about a month’s worth of daylight, and at least two weeks of sleep.

I’m going, before I lose any more. Out to smell the real Internet again. Where pixels aren’t just white or blue. I’m not going to erase my profile on FB, not yet anyway, but I won’t be there. And it’s not like I’m severing ties, just asking that friends, family, and other contacts find me where I actually want to spend time. I’m hardly keeping my online presence a secret, quite the contrary.

My current and future focus will just be on my own blog, my Twitter stream, my email inbox, and my honest-to-Bob, real-life work. Talk to you on the other side of the fence!