In case anyone is interested, I just deleted  (not de-activated)  my Facebook account.

I’m not mad at Facebook, but I am glad to be free of it.   It preyed upon all my personal weaknesses (the outsized need for attention, tendency to like sitting around chatting about trivial nonsense, general laziness, voracious hunger for mindless trivial nonsense, sharing trivial nonsense as it occurs at my house, and it also provided me with an unending support for my procrastination habit.)     I’m just not mature enough for Facebook.

So, if anyone else wants to join me and erase yourself from Facebook, here’s what you do:

Once you are logged in to your FB account, go to this link     http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Then all you have to do is provide your password, and their encrypted code.

Then wait fourteen days, never ever logging yourself in to your account.  And sometime during that two week period, somebody at Facebook central will put your account in the trash permanently.

Theoretically, it will then appear that you have never had a Facebook account.   So, this is more drastic than just de-activating.   If you were to change your mind, you would have to start again from scratch…..building that bank of friends and  posting all those photographs and telling the world which bands and which sitcoms and which groups you want to be associated with.    And I guess you’d have to start all over on the Mafia Wars and Farmville ladder as well.

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Here’s a copy of the e-mail I just received from the guy who’ll be putting me in the trash:

Hi Missy,

We have received a request to permanently delete your account. Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days.

If you did not request to permanently delete your account, please login to Facebook to cancel this request:

http://www.facebook.com/login.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

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