Tonight I had a friend tell me, “Just deleted my Twitter account, feels good.” I asked why, she responded that she didn’t need it anymore.” Sound theory, but I’d like to offer a little counter advice, the same advice I gave her.
Never delete your social network accounts. In an age where digital fraud is common, and social engineering is the #1 form of hacking, deleting a social network is at best a way to give someone a free pass to impersonate you and at worst giving someone a ticket to try to attack all of your friends.
See, the thing is, when you delete your account, after a period of time, that username will be opened up again, someone can register that and then use it pretending to be you. Anyone from a crazy ex-boyfriend or wife to a Nigerian scam artist.
So what do to instead? Easy, if you can just blank out all of the personal identifying information (PII) on the account and leave it active. If you didn’t care enough to delete it, you shouldn’t care if it’s still out there and full of junk info.
If the site won’t allow you to empty it, just fill it with crap. Create a junk email address, change your primary to that, and fill it with made up information. Make up a name, etc.
The nice side effect is that if you ever decide you want that account back, you can just start using it again. No harm!
In the beginning I accepted every request. When a graduation class group started, the invites started pouring in like a flood. I accepted all of them and before long I had over 300 friends on Facebook. These days I have 136, and regularly I go through the list and prune it here and there.
I get invites from people I know, and I ignore them. I don’t ignore all of them of course, but I have built criteria over time.
So, what’s the most valuable real estate on Facebook? My feed is the most valuable to me. That’s how I keep up with what the people I care about are up to, and I make sure that I don’t have to sift through things that are irrelevant to me to see it.
Maybe if I read my feed non-stop it wouldn’t matter so much, but as I only check it every little bit, having a mountain of friends will mean you miss a whole lot.
Case in point, my family owns a restaurant in North Carolina. I live in Bellevue, Washington over 3,000 miles away. Now logic would say “it’s your family so accept that request!” but I say no. Any events, specials or news they share will be of no use to me. It may be a bit militaristic, but if the individual family members I follow are on Facebook, I will see what is up in their lives, I don’t need to follow their workplace.
The same goes for vague acquaintances from high school, college and past jobs. Sure my close friends stay, but I see every person that I don’t have a close tie to as potentially erasing information from people I do care about by bumping them down the feed.
I refuse to believe that I have even 136 friends that I should be following so closely, but I have settled at that number…for now.
I guess it comes down to what do you use a social network for. If you are of the narcissistic camp and just want everyone you have ever met to see how awesome you are now, collect away. If you are in the community camp, keep your friends to people you actually engage with and you might find it to be a lot more useful, fun and relevant.
Tonight I had a friend tell me, “Just deleted my Twitter account, feels good.” I asked why, she responded that she didn’t need it anymore.” Sound theory, but I’d like to offer a little counter advice, the same advice I gave her.
