I just deleted my FriendFeed account. Why?
- Several weeks back I decided to formalize my online presence a bit and to build two online social worlds for myself: a business one centered on LinkedIn and a personal one centered on Facebook.
- I decided that my life-friends didn’t want my Facebook feed polluted with automatic status-ing of my 10 work-related tweets/day. And I was reasonably sure that my work friends didn’t want to see pictures of me in high school. (Or, better put, perhaps I didn’t want them seeing pictures of me in high school.)
- So I used FriendFeed to link together LinkedIn, Blogger, Twitter, and SlideShare. And I de-serviced Facebook as a FriendFeed service, effectively cutting the cord between my business world and my personal one.
Then, today, in my Facebook profile, I noticed that somehow FriendFeed was automatically status-ing my blog posts. Oops. I trusted someone with my credentials and now they’re abusing that trust.
There’s only one solution for that. After spending 10 minutes on FriendFeed trying to figure out how to delete my account, I did. And the difficulty in finding out how to delete my account only increased my desire to.
Social networking is all about trust. Trust that the sites will work. Trust that they will maintain security. Trust that they use login credentials responsibly. Trust that the site will make it straightforward to update preferences and delete an account if the owner so chooses.
That trust was violated. Ergo, no more FriendFeed for me.
