Why I deleted my Friendster and Multiply accounts

Yes I did.

It was a bit hard to do, I had 235 friends in Friendster, and I had tons of photos uploaded on my Multiply account. But my motto for this year is to simplify my life. I went through my yahoogroups and left half of the groups I was subscribed to. I even deleted all my inactive accounts in Shelfari, Flixster, Tagged and what-have-yous. Then I stopped at Friendster.

I looked at all my 235 friends and realized that only a handful were my real friends. And they did not even update their account! I do not want virtual friendsters who would just post some glittery greeting on my message board or send me virtual smileys. I wanted friends who I can talk to over coffee, tell the details about the going-ons in my life and laugh at the idiosyncrasies of people around me. Including myself.

And so I went to the account settings and hit the delete button. When Friendster asked for a reason why I was deleting my account, I typed in: "It's complicated."

Then I went to Multiply. I kept that account for couple more weeks after I bid farewell to Friendster. I still hanged on to the idea that I had friends in Multiply who may want to read my blog or view my photos. But then, I got tired viewing their photos and letting them view mine. I got tired responding to their blogs and seeing their responses to mine. Maybe I wanted more meaningful conversations than one-line comments. Or maybe I was rebelling against all forms of convention. And Multiply IS convention. Everyone seems to have it. I wanted to be different.

Blame the artist in me, for it was the one that made me go to my account settings and delete my Multiply account. When the team at Multiply asked why I was deleting my account, I said "I did not want to Multiply, I wanted to simplify." And simplify I did.

Now I have put all my blogs, published articles and photos into one site: www.vanessavelasco.com. It's not a social site, I just put that up for professional purposes. Like a profile or portfolio for would-be clients or contacts. But still I linked this blog to that site, because my blog is something I really cannot delete. I don't know why. Maybe because all my good memories are kept here. And I do want to keep them.

But as for social media, I am making myself scarce on cyberspace. For I'd rather see my friends' real smiles than their virtual smileys, or hear them laugh than see the letters "ROFL" or view some yellow bald cartoon rolling on the floor laughing on my computer window. I guess social media has made me anti-social.

And oh... thank you for reading this entry. Wanna have some coffee sometime? =)