The dark side of 472 Facebook friends

I first joined Facebook a couple of years ago basically to spy on my teenager. He refused to friend me, and told me "Facebook is for teenagers."

I got over it, and decided to find my own friends. Colleagues from around the world, neighbors, cousins, high school classmates. It was really fun for awhile and I became quite addicted.

But lately Facebook has lost its charm. A friend at work said it jumped the shark when everyone started posting "25 Things About Me" notes. Some of those 25 things were things I didn't want to know about some of those people.

Then I tried to get into Twitter. But most of it is so banal. At least Facebook postings were clever, witty, word plays (often, anyway). Twitter is what people are doing, what they heard, videos and blog postings and ads they want me to see. I don't care about that; I want to be entertained. But no matter how I edited my Twitter list, it never seemed that entertaining.

And somehow as I followed Facebook through two generations of changes in the homepage, and kept adding more friends, I lost track of lots of them. No matter how I edited my status feed, it never seemed to have what I wanted in it.

The boundaries melted, too many random people, too many people whose names pop up and I'm like, HUH? Who is that? Too many messages to answer.

So now I'm giving up, at least for awhile. I'm taking a leave of absence from Facebook.

And maybe it'll free up so much time I'll actually get the damn taxes done.