Four Island

As most of you may know, I am filled with a contempt for Facebook that is a lot of contempt. Why yes. Dot dot dot. Anyway, though I have not yet posted my reasons for quitting Facebook on Four Island, I will make sure that I do so before I completely quit. Yes, I'm only going to gradually phase out of Facebook because a lot of people still use Facebook for a ton of various things and while it's going to be difficult convincing my friends to use these alternatives that exist, it will hopefully be possible.

You may notice that this post says "Phase 2". That is because I have already been doing Phase 1 for quite a while: stop logging into Facebook. I haven't logged into the Facebook Website (though I still log into Facebook Chat via Pidgin) for quite some time now; the only exceptions being when people specifically tell me to go look at something. So I think Phase 1 has been a success.

Phase 2 starts today. As of August 6th 2010, I have disabled email notifications on Facebook messages. That means that if you send me a Facebook message (instead of doing the proper thing and just emailing me), I will not know about it, I will not read it and I will certainly not respond to it. Sorry if this sounds a bit mean, but I am very tired of receiving emails from Facebook notifying me of messages that I have to go back to Facebook to reply to and not being able to have my entire email archive IN my email account and having the nice pretty email threads that GMail does.

I will probably not implement Phase 3 for a month or so, just so people can get used to Phase 2. While Phase 2 isn't really too difficult to do as most people have normal email accounts (in fact, you need to have one to get a Facebook account), Phase 3 is a bit more dangerous because it assesses the laziness of my friends. YOU CAN DO IT, FRIENDS! BE STRONG! :P

So, remember, the next time you want to send me an asynchronous long message, what do you do? Email it to me. Because if you Facebook Message it to me, it would be equivalent to writing a letter and then burning it. Because I may never, in fact, see it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, you may have noticed: I changed the font on Four Island for Layout 7. It's a webfont called Delicious (with a fallback of Verdana) that I think looks quite beautiful and just the right size. This is a pleasant change from Lucida Grande (with a fallback of Arial) which, though I LOVE Lucida Grande in the desktop environment, I think made Four Island rather ugly and difficult to read. Hopefully this works well! :D