Deleting vs. Deactivating: A Comparison

Facebook for Higher Education: fb_explosion

“Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?” is the question Facebook asks everyone who is seeking to take a vacation from Facebook. Deactivating is the option Facebook gives users to make their name, photos, and profile invisible to Facebook the Facebook community. For instance, if Jake made comments on Jane’s wall, and later deactivated his account, the comments would still appear, but the author would be “Facebook User, ” instead of “Jake”.

We assume this design decision was made in order to preserve the state Jake’s Facebook relationships and conversations were in prior to his deactivation. Many people, including myself, have deactivated their accounts, only to “re-activate” them at a later date. Since “re-activating” your account virtually restores everything back to normal, it’s not a viable solution for some folks who are turned off from Facebook’s most recent privacy updates.

Facebook for College Admissions: Deactivating your Facebook Account

Some people think Facebook’s new changes are unacceptable, and that the only solution is to jump ship like internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Jumping ship could mean two things: deactivating or deleting. Deactivating, which in Facebook’s terms means “taking a vacation,” is sufficient for people who want to take a break from status updates and tagged photos. But for people who really want to get out of dodge, deleting their accounts is necessary. Facebook’s made it a very lengthy process – a grand total of two weeks to make sure that you are off of Facebook altogether. Located in a separate place from deactivating your account, here’s the link on Facebook to delete your account.

The craze over Facebook’s privacy changes has gotten so out of hand, that not only is it the top suggestion on Google when you type in the word “deactivate,” but a record number of Facebook users have begun to search to find delete instructions. But is this ideal? What are the alternatives to a social network where all of your friends and family already spend their time?

Alternatives for keeping in touch with friends

A journalist from the New York Times wrote about the phenomenon of Gen-Y people going against the grain by keeping things offline. This, amongst other things, makes us ask, what are the alternatives for personal social networking? There are several, as shown by this spreadsheet. Our favorite is just using a blog, like our founder Michael Staton’s Edumorphology, and some kind of RSS reader. Tumblr is a great product as well.

Four NYU students have made a media splash by focusing on decentralization of data and openness. It’s called Diaspora, and their goal is to “decentralize the web”. As a vote of confidence in their idea and their ambition, the startup fundraiser Kickstarter generated over $200,000 for the programmers to spend the summer coding. (Full disclosure: Diaspora is founded by one of our co-founder’s siblings). Diaspora claims to be making a social networking framework that a person can store on their own server, that has all of Facebook’s core functionality (friends, status updates, and photos), minus the oversight from Facebook. In other words, you’ll be able to have your own Facebook. No security concerns. Sounds great, right? For personal use? Maybe. But definitely not for your institution.

Good sources that we’ve found with information about deleting your Facebook account are here: How to delete your Facebook group permanently.