I’m finally doing it (again). It’s going to stick (this time).

While I have enjoyed having distance-mediated contact with friends and family through sites like Facebook I am officially canning my accounts. The platform lock-in is stifling innovation. The social graph meta information is being used with malcompetence. The media filtering has magnified the destruction of public discourse. The demographically targeted advertising has reached a degree of precision that I’m not comfortable with. The corporations benefiting from our collectively generated content are no longer decent netizens.

Moving forward, I will continue building out services that provide the same degree of communication and sharing as are available on social media platforms. This will, however, be a reversion to an older Internet toolset. Facebook wall/status updates will require subscribing to my various feeds via RSS. Instant messaging will require an IRC client. Email is still email, but the signal provided by that platform continues to degrade.

My goal, beyond not feeding the monolith, is to return to an older, more personally curated Internet experience. There are many advantages to returning to this sort of experience. I will explore sites based on interests, forums I frequent, and searches for topics that catch my fancy instead of platform-pushed content. I will own my content. I will have fewer, but more meaningful, online “friends”. I will invest more time and effort developing the tools I use. I will be closer to the technologies driving current development. I will own these tools.

At any rate, this is the hope. I’ll see you around.