Goodbye, Facebook; Hello open Web

I grew weary of Facebook a long time ago. Yet I was drawn to it all the while. There’s one thing they got right: showing me snippets of the life of family and friends by suppressing frontiers, overcoming distance and time zones. That is what I’ll miss –its unique ability to show me, at my pace, inklings that are valuable, endearing, funny.

But I grew wary of it a few months ago, while after searching for alcohol ink techniques on my smartphone’s mobile browser the Facebook app immediately suggested I join a few groups on the subject. Whether this was relevant or useful is beyond the point. The Facebook app has hardly any business spying on the history of the browser app.

So I waved goodbye to Facebook’s intrusive practices a few days ago. So long, daily dose of comfort and social peep show.

It may take a bit of effort to write on one’s blog or maintain a Website, and probably takes a massive one for those unfamiliar with the open Web to open the garden wall door and explore the Web, use it.

Someone lamented that they would miss seeing my drawings. But Facebook was just an additional space that I shared those on —a space of crappy definition images— just because there’s a world of apps on smartphones and a population of app users who happen to find it convenient to be fed those.

My drawings go to my blog, in high-resolution definition. My blog has a syndication feed. It means that any update to my blog is signaled. And any feed aggregator can pick up that signal and relay it. This is the principle behind RSS (really simple syndication).

You can read more in a recent article at Wired.