¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. Facebook. No, I’m not trying to index my blog. This represents the buffer overflow (» overload) of information. Nicholas Carr would be proud of it (NO). Today I’m deleting (again) some of my facebook info. It is soooo hard to stop giving information / maintaining (on-line) privacy while you enter in an inertia state. I’ll let some of my steps here; if you care about that, you can try to reproduce them too.

Note: Deleting (actually, deactivating) my facebook account is not an option anymore, because everyone are there… nowadays: to negate facebook is to negate (almost all of) social life. Whoa. Also, I’m writing here some of my practices.

Privacy practices #

• Remove all of my public likes (set privacy to ‘only me’). There’s no way to do this with just one click. You have to set this option to every individual category. And, when facebook (ever) invents a new one, you’ll have to apply it to this one too.

• About my (current) private likes:

  • I’ll just like brands that I have (products of). For example (now): lenovo, motorola, intel. I think this supports the companies.
  • I won’t like anything related to music (anymore).
  • I won’t like anything related to politics (anymore). You see, this web 3.0 thing made everybody think that they have opinion, and more: that their opinions actually are relevant to everyone. That includes me, of course. But this is not true (I think). This is an illusion. Common exception (maybe): mass causes. For example, the june/july protests that happened in Brazil this year. Without internet support this would be condemned to (an obvious) failure.
  • Events: I’ll only like relevant ones (for me). Also, if you usually confirm your presence in an event, I recommend (un)confirming it after the event, otherwise it will be registered forever, yay that you went to the event.
  • I’ll maintain some likes related to page of friends or college.
  • I’ll maintain my likes related to some random campaigns, like phoneblocks.

• My likes have been reduced from ~170 to ~70. Whoooa, so much non-useful information filtered!

• About photos: You won’t see me posting any photos to Facebook (I only did this once since I created an account there), besides my profile picture. Neither tags of me (it’s the same thing, just a different name…). Today I prefer Flickr (from Yahoo) to share public photos, and Dropbox to share personal ones.

• I deleted all of my notes. I used to write them when I hadn’t a Wordpress Blog. To delete notes is a nightmare. 4 clicks for each one.

Additional settings #

• Limit (past) public posts.
• Deactivate audio notifications.
• Hide all non-useful posts. I usually click in “hide all” in posts of friends full of non-useful info. This helps reducing (A LOT) the amount of spam in my timeline, and hopefully helps me seeing (more) relevant information from relevant people. Google+ is better in this category, because its circle feature allows one to customize what he’ll see. (You can say facebook has lists, but nobody uses them, really.)

Timeline and sharing practices #

• I don’t write birthday wishes on the timeline of my friends. The few ones that I care about (or remember, sorry, there are much (not toooo much, actually) to remember them all or to see birthdays everyday) I write private messages to.
• I (almost 99% of times) never accept any (photo) tagging.
• If anyone ever posts to my timeline, its contents will be only visible for me. Let’s don’t be orkut with public messages (oh, the old scraps…) all over the place, please.
• I used to share some flood (please don’t read flood as spam; read flood as wasteful or non-useful or non-relevant info) way too much. Now I try to reduce this. I won’t say I only share useful info, because the majority of people in facebook simply don’t care about them. According to Lunduke, ~“they are there (only) to see photos of babies…”, sums up this.
• Only post public posts when they must be public. Your default settings should be to post to friends (or maybe friends of friends). Or maybe only you, who knows…(Please don’t use facebook as a bookmarking place.)
• To stay on-line all the time is not really an issue (fast connection, we’re not in the ‘00 anymore \o/), but it is better (for me, at least) to use some client to do it, like Pidgin.
• To stay up do date with general subjects, I prefer using a RSS feed.

Finally, the world changes, and we have to change with it (or stay behind, which I don’t find a wise choice). These practices may or may not change or apply to the future. But now they are good. Thank you for reading.