I just deleted my FriendFeed account. Why?
- Several weeks back I decided to formalize my online presence a bit and to build two online social worlds for myself: a business one centered on LinkedIn and a personal one centered on Facebook.
- I decided that my life-friends didn’t want my Facebook feed polluted with automatic status-ing of my 10 work-related tweets/day. And I was reasonably sure that my work friends didn’t want to see pictures of me in high school. (Or, better put, perhaps I didn’t want them seeing pictures of me in high school.)
- So I used FriendFeed to link together LinkedIn, Blogger, Twitter, and SlideShare. And I de-serviced Facebook as a FriendFeed service, effectively cutting the cord between my business world and my personal one.
Then, today, in my Facebook profile, I noticed that somehow FriendFeed was automatically status-ing my blog posts. Oops. I trusted someone with my credentials and now they’re abusing that trust.
There’s only one solution for that. After spending 10 minutes on FriendFeed trying to figure out how to delete my account, I did. And the difficulty in finding out how to delete my account only increased my desire to.
Social networking is all about trust. Trust that the sites will work. Trust that they will maintain security. Trust that they use login credentials responsibly. Trust that the site will make it straightforward to update preferences and delete an account if the owner so chooses.
That trust was violated. Ergo, no more FriendFeed for me.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Anonymous // Dec 2, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Allow FriendFeed to publish posts or comments without prompting me.
Posts will appear on your Wall, in your friends' News Feeds and in applications like Photos, Videos and Notes.
You will be able to change this permission from the Applications Settings page.
-=> Word Verification: incia <=-
2 Dave Kellogg // Dec 3, 2009 at 6:12 am
I concede that I'm perhaps a bad user. But then again, I'm not *that* dumb a guy and I searched (twice) and thought I'd disabled it, but it kept going.
Plus de-servicing Facebook as a service should, imho, been a brute-force, overkill solution that definitely worked.
When I found that *didn't* work, I lost trust. And, as mentioned, FriendFeed's obscuring the delete-my-account option all seemed consistent with the picture.
FWIW, I stopped using AOL a long time when I realized you could sign up online but could only de-sign-up by calling. Bad form.
3 Harsh Agrawal // Feb 27, 2010 at 4:29 am
I use FriendFeed as a lifestream widget, so when it goes down the last cached values get displayed and no harm is done. That’s the only practical use I see for them, but it works really well for that purpose.
4 Dave Kellogg // Mar 2, 2010 at 3:16 pm
that great. happy you like it. for me, the fact that i couldn’t easily turn off the facebook linkage was the end.
Leave a Comment