The Exodus

Fall of 2011, and Facebook is rolling out a real-time ticker and their Timeline. And people are freaking out. I was all set to play with the timeline thing; thought it might be kind of cool, but... there's something else... FB follows me around the web, wherever I go, taking notes and reporting back to the rest of the FB world what I am up to. I don't even have to hit a "like" button or a "share on Facebook" link; it just knows where I went. 

Hmph. I don't even like someone following me around a store... much less around the web. 

FB is starting to feel like one of those flying bugs that won't leave me alone. It's annoying. And... it's invasive. I don't really WANT everything I do broadcast to the world, thank you... Seems that a lot of my friends feel the same way. A lot of them are cancelling their Facebook accounts (or planning to -- I'm curious about whether that's an easy process or a difficult one). A lot of them are porting over to Google+, which is finally becoming active instead of a silent wasteland. Myself, I pulled Facebook off of my main browser (Firefox), and launched Safari for the first time on this machine (which meant it was a browser with no preferences or cookies or history), and quarantined Facebook over there. If it's not going to play nicely with my other browsing, I just have to separate it. 

Bad social network. No cookies.