I used to think Facebook was cool.

Really. I thought they were cool because they used an open source toolchain, contributed back to the open source community occasionally, and seemed to care about my privacy. Facebook wasn’t particularly useful; I never found a friend there who I really wanted to communicate with, nor did it seem a revolution in service. My friends were my real-life friends. The Facebook experience was the same old social web, rehashed, and in a lot of ways pleasantly limited.

I wasn’t one of those snobby first-wave college users. I wasn’t even a second- or third-waver. I was just one of those people that joined because a lot of people seemed to be using it.

I never sunk a lot of time into Facebook. The most, maybe, was playing Scrabulous on the site. I don’t have a real attachment to the site. Frankly, I would prefer a distributed network, like, um, the internet, rather than a site with one point of control and failure.

That said, Facebook was nice enough. It showcased all the best things integrated applications do best: It was seamless, it was networked, and it was, well, integrated. You didn’t have to think about anything too much.

Then, it began to show the worst things about integrated applications: It became sprawling, unfocussed, and ultimately lost any credibility it had had in my eyes.

How did it lose this creditability? Well, as soon as it started depending overly on ad revenue, glaring, bothersome ad revenue. As soon as started seeing its customer base as a cash-cow to be milked, especially when it does so at the expense of privacy, as with the recent Beacon debacle. If a company is willing to track what I buy and then publish those results to my friends unless I opt out every time, I consider that evil.

I don’t care what they’ve done to fix it now. That Zuckerberg and company would stoop this low is just a hint of what sort of morals they have as a company. It makes the allegation that Zuckerberg stole the original implementation of Facebook from colleagues at Harvard that much more believable. It makes the whole thing seem slimy, slightly dirty.

Why am I talking about Facebook in the past tense, you wonder?

I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m opting out. Closing down shop. Kicking the bucket out from underneath my Facebook account.

I feel a bit cleaner already.

Attribution and License for the above photo.