On Leaving Facebook

So on Friday I left Facebook.  Not for good, just a for about two and a half months to get some time and perspective on service I’d become quite an avid user of.

On Wednesday, January 2nd I announced that I’d be leaving as of the following Friday and I immediately disconnected Facebook integration from various systems and turned off Facebook messenger.  For the next few days it was kind of nice.  I felt less compelled to check Facebook every 5 minutes and distracted myself with reading, communicating with friends through email and other IM services and a few other things. 

I didn’t really feel the weight of the decision until Friday when I said the final good-bye and signed off until March.  I think having the opportunity to log back in over the course of the week made deciding not to log in a lot easier.  Since Friday, the number of times I’ve found myself wanting to check on my news feed, or look something up, or just log in for no reason has been a lot.

The other thing is that I found myself wanting an outlet to say something.  I’ve always thought that my blog stopped because it just wasn’t something I was good at.  I think I actually do like the writing, it’s just that I had a medium that I could post smaller, more regular updates with Facebook.  Facebook is nice because it provides greater access to your friends and it’s easier to interact with commenters.  Additionally, everyone’s already subscribing to you in Facebook.  It’s harder to know who actually reads your posts in the blogger world because people have to go to your blog to see what you have to say, rather than have it there in front of you.

I do plan to return to Facebook as I’ve found it to be a useful tool that has reconnected me with old friends, helped build and sustain new friendships, and just is useful for communication and planning events.  I just think it needs to be on my terms and it needs to be useful to me, not just something I find I have to check for fear of what I might be missing.

I also have no idea if this post presages a return to blogging, but I think I may find I need at least some outlet to put my thoughts down on and this works for the moment.