A feature article because a woman decided to close her Facebook account?
So it seems. True, this particular woman happens to have been a wordsmith for Mark Zuckerberg, so her story might be of greater curiosity, or shock value, than that of the average Facebook user. But there is less of a story than meets the eye, because it turns out that this woman (one Ms. Katherine Losse) left Facebook more as an experiment than as a final decision, and eventually reopened her page.
Nevertheless, I think the story has resonance because of the poor showing Facebook has made in financial markets since going public.
I've got a Facebook account too, suggested to me by more than one friend two or three years ago as a way to stay current with - or even to locate - old friends from whom I'd drifted apart. Yet I recently realized that it had been two months (at least) since I had last bothered to check in to my Facebook account.
Why? A variety of things. I evidently didn't feel I was getting much that was useful from Facebook. It hadn't taken too long for me to get sick of Zuckerberg's highhanded way of changing account features without notice, and of his dubious use of people's data. More recently, it developed that it's almost impossible to avoid Facebook: browsers will suck in your data and connections from it automatically; smart phones will start trying to connect you up to it; far too many websites now suggest you log in using Facebook data, meaning that they can link up to your contacts and "likes" too.
In short, Facebook sits astride the internet highway collecting a huge toll in terms of privacy, though it neither built nor maintains the highway; it offers relatively little that's useful, and - worst - requires a huge amount of my time if I want to manage where and how my information is going or being used (and keep up with the site's constantly changing rules and SOPs).
I still have my account for now, but I suspect of the reported 900 million users, there must be a huge number like me, whose use for and interest in Zuckerberg's creation is occasional and only minimally enthusiastic. It's not surprising the stock is doing poorly. I suspect the company's destiny is to be a flash in the pan.
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