Alex Johnson – Journalist at Large

Goodbye, Facebook. I’ll miss the updates from my friends, but I won’t miss you or your always-changing, let’s-see-if-we-can-trick-users-into-divulging-all-their-info privacy shenanigans.

I won’t miss the flood of useless Farmville/Mafia Wars/You’ve-Earned-A-Star!/Support-My-Cause autogenerated spam.

I won’t miss your lockbox Terms of Service (which neither you nor I ever read all the way through) and their declaration that you own and can license all my content.

I won’t miss dreadfully misleading “delete account” process, which seeks to trick users into thinking they’ve deleted their accounts when they’ve actually only “deactivated” them — thereby leaving all their content on your servers to use as you wish.

It was fun for a while, Facebook, but now you’ve grown too big for your britches. I’m casting my lot with Twitter, instead (I’m at @MAlexJohnson).