Why I don't have nor a Twitter neither a Facebook account
A lot of people have been asking me the same question everytime for some months now:
Why don't you have a Twitter account?
Or, the slightly-modified version:
Why don't you have a Facebook account?
The answer is quite straight (imho):
Because I don't want to
But, let me explain myself a little bit about that topic.
If you are a close friend of mine, or you know me even only a little bit, you will know that I'm not the kind of guy that like things everybody like. Yes, that's how I am (and I'm really happy to be like this), I don't like to go to places where everybody goes or do things everybody do or use things everybody use, only because everybody go there, do that or use this. I need to check things by myself and see if I like them (ok ok, you can think now that I'm one of those exclusivity snobs that don't like things only because people use/do/go/whatever them, it could be another point of view ;D).
And I definetely don't like Twitter or Facebook.
Why? (you may be asking yourself)
Well, in the case of Twitter, I don't find it useful at all. Do not misunderstand my point, I can understand that someone could find it useful, but I don't. I don't get the point of sharing sms-like messages in a single website. If I want to write about something, I would write an article about it and the publish it somewhere. If I want to write some lines about me (my personal life, my professional experiences, whatever) I would write a post in my weblog (which is like a personal log, which makes sense to me) and if I want to communicate with someone else I would talk with that person using IRC or any other kind of instant messaging tool (or I would send this person an email if she is not available for a conversation).
I don't get the point of writing sms-sized messages in a website... sorry, even if you can subscribe using rss or use that shiny-cool-megatop app in your iphone|android|palm|nintendoDS|PSP|whatever device to read and write messages. For me it is a waste of time and some sort of re-invention of the wheel.
Of course, it is cool, because you are limited to a certain ammount of characters... WTF!. I can write too much (or too many) characters as I want in my blog!
In the case of Facebook it has nothing to do with it being useful or not. I think that the social networking idea is useful, a lot, but only if you use it properly.
Perhaps there is something wrong about me, but I can't understand why someone created two days ago a group in Facebook to support a guy here in spain that called vodafone and waited 22 hours for the call to be cancelled by the other side, while listening to the usual standby music and I can't understand that such group grew up to more than 1500 people friends. One again, a waste of time.
I don't have a Facebook account because I would not trust an external provider on having personal information about me and what is worse (imho), to have information about my relations with other people. Call me paranoid, it is ok.
I don't have a Facebook account because I would not like to receive spam messages from Facebook itself, asking me to join some stupid "have your farm" or "build your cookies" game, or asking me to fullfill some stupid poll about my favourite sport, food or country, etc etc
Another interesting point of view about Facebook is this post from Eric Florenzano, where it covers some numbers about Facebook, and how it is the "big one" out there in social networking. From there you could get another point of view, as Eric talks about the capabilities of Facebook connect and some other APIs that you can use to add Facebook support to your webapps (which has nothing to do with me not having an account, but I think it is interesting enough).
There are a lot more reasons not to be in Facebook, but I think that probably the one that would show my oppinion at best is that I do have an account on Linkedin.
Oh, and just in case you are right now wondering if I only dislike Twitter and Facebook because they are some kind of famous now and everybody is using them. This is not the reason at all. There are some other services, like Flickr which I find useful (even if I don't have an account, because I'm not a guy that take good photos).
And that, my friends, is why I don't have nor a Twitter neither a Facebook account.