Why, When and How I’m Ending My Public Facebook Profile

Why, When and How I’m Ending My Public Facebook Profile May 6, 2011

UPDATE, May 7: Profile migration complete. Please “like” and share MY NEW FACEBOOK PAGE.

In the whole scheme of the world’s problems, all this Social Media stuff is pretty silly, I know it, you know it . . . but we love it anyway.  As many of you know I am one who gets all up into the social networking innards and believe that it is a powerful way to genuinely build and nurture community. Plus I really enjoy diving into the theory and praxis of it all.  At the same time, as I my social media footprint has grown, I have discovered a great need to consolidate and focus.  With a few new projects around the bend, trying to navitage and maintain multiple Facebook identities has become a tad bit crazy.

So on Midnight tonight, Friday May 6th my public profile will cease to be.

I will take advantage of a new Facebook Feature that allows a profile to be migrated to a page. The end result will be that I will have a very public page on which I can interact with people to my heart’s content without worrying about that pesky 5,000 friend limit – yeah I just dropped the, I’m so popular, I have 5K friends comment . . . jerk – and then I’ll have a profile that will be buried behind far more privacy settings and will be made of actual friends and family.  It’s my hope that I can consolidate the 5K from my profile with the other 1,500 from my current page and have an ongoing big ass party on my new and only public facebook location.

This is currently my social media dream. Sad, but true.

This migration will probably be more of a pain for me as I lose a good deal of info and content during this process, but I know that some of you are JUST as geeky as I am about this, and I hope will continue to hang out and interact, so here is what it means for you:

  1. If you are currently my friend, don’t do anything, you will just be made into a person who “likes” my new page. Updates and things will show up there like any page that you like.
  2. If you are already on my current page, you will need to come on over to the new one as I’ll delete that page in a few weeks.
  3. If I know you and you are a friend IRL or a rally good virtual friend, I will slowly be refriending people on my more private page.  If you can navigate the fire-breathing lemurs that are guarding my new profile, feel free to send a request, but please be patient as I know that I may miss folks along the way. It is not personal.

I will say, while I this is going to a big old administrative pain for a bit as I refriend, fix links, etc., there is something really refreshing about rebooting my facebook profile and consolidating my public interaction, at least that is what I am telling myself as I go through making sure I don’t do anything too stupid.  I will also post a “tips for migrating your page” when I am done, but in the mean time here is a good review of the positives and negatives of the migration process from Inside Facebook.

So there you have it, while there will certainly be some hiccups as this transition is made, it will make my life so much easier and I hope OUR interaction that much better.

PS: Here is the migration link, but please be VERY careful as you do not want to inadvertently migrate and lose your profile.


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