I’m such a rebel. That is the only way I can explain my hate affair with Facebook. Or I’m lazy. That could be it too. You see, years ago when I started with Facebook, I didn’t bother to read the volumes-long small print that says something to the effect that you can’t use anything but your absolutely, positively real name. Later out found out I was one of the bad boys of Facebook, so I created a PFD page, but never bothered to convert my followers – you all seemed pretty happy with your current denominational status. Years later FB sent me a nice note saying, “by the way, we don’t allow you to do this, so please open a regular account with your (or someone elses) real name and we’ll transition all of your lovely followers to fans”.
I gave this some serious thought. Facebook seems to slowly be fading away. I know fewer and fewer people that actively use their accounts anymore, but Twitter seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. Not only that, but – and I can’t believe that I just found out about this – but when I make a new post and a notification automatically goes out to FB, unless I want to pay them, only about 6% of my followers have the notice appear in their feed. Suddenly the emails I’ve received over the past year saying that they thought I was dead because I don’t post anymore suddenly made sense. Now that Google’s feed reader is dead, it seems lots of you good folks use Facebook thinking it is a good way to keep up with your favorite sites. Note: it isn’t. Finally, though I don’t personally know the bulk of my followers, now and then I enjoy peering into your lives
Because of all of these issues, I wasn’t going to bother with the whole thing, but then I blew the dust of my analytics, and discovered that enough of you come from the blue behemoth that is was probably worth my time to convert the account. I cajoled a friend to taking over the page, jumped on to FB, followed their instructions, and was promptly told “this person is an invalid account”. Hmm. I tried another and got the same result. Tried family members who have been on FB for years – same result. I messed with this for weeks, searched the FB help forums, and even reached out to FB themselves, to no avail. Finally I just created a new account. The old one was PDX FoodDude. The new one is PDX Food Dude. Notice the space. Yes, it’s an ugly page at the moment, but if it survives for a while, I’ll slap on some new paint.
Now I wouldn’t be surprised if they shut the new one down because it is too much like the old name, but on the other hand, they won’t let me delete the old one. Still, if you are on FB and would like to follow/Like/whatever the page, that would be lovely. You can do so here. We’ll see what happens. If they do close it, I’ll just brush the dust off of my hands and say good riddance.
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