internet

I deleted my Facebook account because in the past three years, I barely used it. It’s ironic, considering I worked there. ¹

More irony: I never used it as much as I did when I worked there.

Yet more irony: a huge portion of my Facebook news feed was activity by a handful of Facebook employees. ²

No longer useful

I used to like Facebook because it delivered on its original mission:

Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

They’re clearly no longer true to that mission. ³

When I joined in November 2007, the news feed chronologically listed status updates from your friends. Great!

Since then, they’ve done every imaginable thing to increase time spent, also known as the euphemistic “engagement”. They’ve done this by surfacing friends’ likes, suggested likes, friends’ replies, suggested friends, suggested pages to like based on prior likes, and of course: ads. Those things are not only distractions, they’re actively annoying.

First of all, if you don’t know it yet:

###What is the WHATWG? The WHATWG is a growing community of people interested in evolving the Web. It focuses primarily on the development of HTML and APIs needed for Web applications.

Now, how did I end up getting involved in this? If you’re a Drupal user, you might have heard of my Hierarchical Select module. Well, for version 3 of this module, I decided to work on this issue: try to eliminate as much queries to the server as possible, by taking advantage of HTML 5’s client-side database storage.
It’s currently only supported by Safari >=3.1 (or WebKit nightlies as of October 17th) and Firefox 3 (I can’t seem to find confirmation for Firefox though).