I've never really liked Facebook. I forget exactly when I ended up on there -- perhaps 2009 or so -- but I can remember exactly who to blame. It was all the fault of Rich Daley. On an atheism-oriented BB that has long since fallen off the net he convinced me that it was "X for adults" (where X was a popular early social network whose name totally escapes me now) and I fell for it.

And I hated it.

But I stuck with it.

I stuck with it until September 2011. I realised that after a few years of using it I still found the site confusing, ugly, unfriendly (in terms of design) and somewhat invasive too. On top of that I'd made the common mistake of allowing anyone I'd ever run unto on the net add me there and so the contact list was huge and out of control -- I didn't really know who most of the people were. So I deleted the account.

Back then there was, as I recall, no explicit delete option, or to do the delete thing you had to deactive and wait 14 days, or some such thing. I know that I followed the advice in the docs and did whatever was required to have my account totally deleted.

This week, at the urging of friends, I finally decided to create an account again. I initially tried to create the account using the old email address (well, actually, a variation on it that would appear to be the same to systems that understand the significance of a + in an email address) but it told me that the address was in use. Which was a worry.

So I created the account using a different address (my actual "main" address this time, as opposed to my Google address) and set about setting it up.

In doing so I tried to tell it that I wanted to associate my old address with this new account and, again, it refused, telling me there was an active account for that address.

I then went and checked and, sure enough, there was my old account, still there, all the data, nothing had changed!

Fucking Facebook!

These days, however, it does look like there are very clear instructions on how to actually fully delete an account, so I've tried again for the old account. It's another 14 days of deactivation but with an actual promise that, yes, this time, they'll delete all my shit.

They better.

Meanwhile... I have a shiny new Facebook account. And I still find it confusing, ugly, unfriendly (in terms of design) and somewhat invasive.