Updated: Ivo Vegter has left Facebook
I promised I’d leave Facebook if it did a deal with Microsoft. I said I’d make good on this promise.
Some impatient souls (or should I say Facebook Fanboys) weren’t even prepared to grant me a few days to tie up loose ends and inform friends and group members, but insisted that I delete my Facebook account instantly.
This update is for them. My account is now gone. To be accurate, it is available for perusal only by Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft.
I can be found on Orkut, LinkedIn and Plaxo Pulse. I’ve never liked the idea of using more than one social network site, however, so eventually I’ll choose. I quite like the update stream and look-and-feel of Plaxo, but in the end I’ll probably settle on Orkut. Especially since it’s due for a re-launch and overhaul starting next week. I can’t wait.
Of the three, I really don’t see LinkedIn as a Facebook replacement. It doesn’t seem designed for any form of meaningful personal interaction. Pulse is a great social stream platform and Orkut is shaping up to be a good social network/social stream platform too.
You could run your feeds into both Pulse and Orkut and focus your attention on Orkut, while keeping an eye on your growing Pulse community.
LinkedIn strikes me as fairly opaque and not very compelling. Maybe it’s supposed to wear a grey suit, since it’s intended to be a business network, not a social network. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that notion, but maybe it has hidden depths that I haven’t yet discovered.
[…] privacy issue is a big concern and we will have to see how this is managed. As concerned as some people are about Microsoft having access to Facebook data (whether that will happen or not), the data […]
I just checked out Orkut’s privacy policy - it doesn’t seem any more promising than Facebook. Are there any social networking sites that don’t share ones info with all and sundry? And is Orkut still a viable option ? I am seriously fed-up with facebook - is social networking supposed to be so superficial?
To be honest, I haven’t been on Orkut for months. It’s true that Google isn’t exactly a bastion of privacy. Its entire business model is based on the opposite. My reasoning goes something like: Google already owns my soul and have not yet betrayed me, and I’d rather risk my soul only once, than risk it everywhere.
I still collect connections on LinkedIn and Plaxo, but I rarely use those networks either. The latter looks most promising, actually, but I have yet to take to an alternative to Facebook. From what I hear about Facebook these days, I’m pretty pleased I left, however. It does indeed appear to be that superficial.