I’ve always avoided Facebook “applications” – because they’re all designed to surreptitiously  glean more information about its users – and leverages the social networking model to bully other people in a social circle to do the same. Lately, I’ve seen a huge uptick in “Top Five” posts where people on my friends list have offered up their personal favorite movies, TV shows, foods, whatever… which not only clogs the status page with crap I don’t care about, but also (I believe) unwittingly sets up those people to receive a deluge of ads from Facebook. I find this distasteful, but as long as *I’m* not the one having his home page run over with ads echoing my “top five” rock-and-roll albums, I’m okay with it. I *really* would have liked to have control on *my* home page as to whether to show that stuff from other folks – because it’s really just another form of advertising as far as I’m concerned.

But now, I’ve become incensed over Facebook’s ham-handed approach to laying up ads on my home page. I can deal with the “meet sexy female singles over 40″ ads on my site – because indeed, I’m single and Facebook knows my gender interests and date of birth (as does anyone else that’s “friended” me on FB or knows me personally). But when I put the word “Margarita” in my Facebook status and all-of-the-sudden I start seeing stupid ads for the “real age” test that’s actually a Trojan Horse for Big Pharma to collect information and market *their* intoxicants, I become more than simply irritated. At this point, I get really, really REALLY hacked off…

So that does it. I’m leaving Facebook. I downloaded Fonebook to synchronize my Facebook contacts with Outlook – and then I will in turn synchronize that with my mobile phone. After I figure out how to delete my FB account, I’ll be gone from *that* part of the Cyberverse…

[Update] Facebook tries to trick you into simply “deactivating” your account – and even tries to leave a back door open for your friends’ invites to continue reaching you via email – ostensibly to pull you back into the site. Once you log back in – VIOLA! - you’re magically re-activated again… However, there’s a page to request deletion of your Facebook account that actually fully and finally deletes your account after 14 days. I still think it’s a bit of a marketing ploy to wait two weeks to finally delete someone’s account, and I imagine that I’ll start seeing emails from Facebook in my inbox, but that’s what SPAM filters are for… anyway, lesson learned.