Oh how I hate facebook

I had an e-mail today to say Welcome back to Facebook!  And that if I hadn't reactivated my account I should go to facebook help.  Of course it wasn't me who reactivated my account.  So I have just spent half an hour having to reactivate it in order to change the password and then removing all information from it -- the profile picture alone had to be deleted from several different places, and it wouldn't let me delete my name, birthday, or gender.  Just out of curiosity I looked at its page of suggested friends, and became absolutely furious about the accuracy of its predictions.  It has to have had access to my e-mail correspondence in some way to do that.  There's no other way it would suggest I should be friends with Kevin Kiernan, Professor of English at Kentucky, with whom I once shared a conference session and a brief polite argument about manuscript digitisation.  Last time I tried to get rid of facebook you could only deactivate your account, but now you can delete it, so I've set that in motion.  It takes fourteen days.

Possibly my account was hacked.  Christmas is the season for hacking and spamming, I suppose because a lot of bored people have time on their hands.  But if I were facebook I would send that message to all deactivated accounts from time to time, to force them to reactivate and perhaps lure tham back in for monetisation.

I first got a facebook account at the instigation of a friend who wanted to show me something he thought was funny, and which I really didn't, and that's been my whole experience with facebook ever since.  I have never looked at anyone's facebook page without thinking just a little the less of them, which is why it's not for me, because I like to like my friends.  I can't believe how much of my time and patience that website has taken up.

Of course I probably wouldn't be in such a bad mood if the snow had thawed.  It's ten days since it fell and it's pretty much all still there.