Faceblecch

I connected with a young woman living in New York through MySpace and then later on Facebook. I was interested in meeting her in person but I never got the opportunity. Then, just a few days ago, I noticed she was no longer on my list of Facebook friends, and I thought she must have deleted me. Then I remembered that we had a mutual Facebook friend, and so I checked the mutual friend's Facebook page. Sure enough, she was missing from our mutual friend's list of friends, meaning she had canceled her Facebook account.

I don't blame this woman, whom I won't identify here. Although Facebook was started as an effort for people who knew each in other in person to connect online, it - like so many social networking sites - has grown to allow people who have never met to connect, and people I have never met in person constitute the majority of my Facebook friends. I actually have good, ongoing friendships with some of these people, but there are others I don't communicate with so much. Sometimes I wonder if I should delete them. After all, we wouldn't miss each other.

Many more people are deleting their Facebook accounts and starting new ones, possibly in an effort to get rid of all of their nominal friends while hoping to get their real ones to put in friend requests on their new pages. But I suspect that increasingly has less to do with it. Facebook was recently found to be spreading private information through its game applications, and all of the mechanisms intended to preserve something resembling privacy are difficult if not impossible for anyone who isn't an absolute computer geek to implement them on their own pages.

Facebook is becoming unreliable in other ways. There was another Facebook outage yesterday afternoon, lasting an hour. Some icons don't show up on the profile pages the way they should, and I found it impossible to add pictures to a Volkswagen fan page I like. Of course, my "likes" are collected to send me advertising Facebook thinks might appeal to me. I have a small monitor and I have to scroll to the right to see my ads. Mostly, I ignore them. But if this issue and the other issues I've already cited are affecting enough people, Faceboook will seem more painful than pleasurable. That is, until Mark Zuckerberg can fix the bugs in the system and find new methods to ensure privacy that we don't need Windows For Dummies to follow.

And if he doesn't act on either of these things, Facebook may very well be replaced by something else, just as Facebook replaced MySpace as the world's favorite networking site.

I hope I find that woman on Facebook again. If not, I hope she has a good life. :-)