Only one of my friends quit Facebook today, how about you?

I lost a friend today. Or so says Facebook, which reports that I now have one fewer “friend” than I began the day with. I don’t know the identity of the friend who deserted me today, but I’m guessing that the abandonment had less to do with something I said and more to do with the fact that today was Quit Facebook Day, a campaign with attacked Facebook over privacy issues and compared quitting Facebook to (I’m not making this up) quitting smoking. Nevermind that smoking will alienate you from most of society and eventually kill you, while the worst that Facebook can do is share super “private” information about you with the world including secrets like (gasp) your name and (oh, no!) your birthday.

So did the campaign work? Well, I began the day with one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven Facebook friends and I also ended it with 1767, a result of having lost one unidentified friend and then having gained a new one later in the day. I’d say my Facebook friendbase is fairly broad and typical, including everyone from friends and family to industry acquaintances and former co-workers, so if I lost less than one tenth of one percent of my friends, it’s fairly safe to assume that less than one tenth of one percent of all Facebook users quit the service today overall. That’s a monumental flop in my book. And yet some have already referred to Quit Facebook Day as a success even before it began, simply because it brought attention to the Facebook privacy issue. I don’t see it that way; what the campaign told the world is that nearly all Facebook users would rather stick with the service, warts and all, than give it up entirely.

“I quit Facebook today and all I got was this lousy MySpace!”

Quit Facebook Day, a campaign so misguided that it scheduled its event on a national holiday during which mainstream Facebook users are most likely to be nowhere near their computers anyway, has predictably flopped – if my loss of a whopping zero out of my current seventeen hundred-plus Facebook friends is any indication. While we’ll never know whether the creators of the “day” were truly attempting to effect positive change or were merely using the recent anti-Facebook PR in an attempt to carry out a geek agenda against service, the public backing of Quit Facebook Day by certain anarchist geeks whose reasons for leaving Facebook had more to do with their own distaste for the non-geekiness of Facebook and its userbase here in 2010 than any motives relating to actual privacy concerns. But in any case, the fact that the campaign received so much national attention yet resulted in a mere 26,000 signups tells us what we already knew before the clock struck midnight: quitting Facebook is no way to fix Facebook.

For social network early adopters, the lesson was learned years ago: Twitter was the only service of its specific type that had any traction, and yet it had terrible problems with uptime which more than once prompted an attempted mass exodus to competing sites like Jaiku and others you’ve never heard of unless you were a part of the mix back then. The reason why such attempted mass migrations never worked was that no one on those services like Jaiku; the few who switched over found themselves to talking to a handful of strangers or no one at all, gave up, and came back. Similarly, the 2010 campaign to try to get users to abandon Facebook has failed because nowhere on the QuitFacebookDay.com site is there a suggestion of what viable alternative the quitters are supposed to then turn to. Sure, we’ve seen some spam here about this or that tiny open source social network which is supposedly going to be the “next Facebook” if it can just get over the hump of only having three current users, but when it comes down to it there’s nowhere to go but Facebook (MySpace is a past-tense wasteland and Twitter is simply too different of a service to be a Facebook replacement), asking mainstream Facebook users to give up social networking entirely is just not the answer.

So what is the solution when it comes to getting Facebook to see it users’ way when it comes to privacy and respect? I’ve said it before: I don’t have that answer, at least not in any specific terms, and not yet. But I do know that winning the philosophical debate with Facebook’s founders (which is what this is, as there’s no actual privacy risk to participating in Facebook, despite what paranoid geek anarchists claim) is a fight which won’t be won by taking our ball and going back to the twentieth century. While some next generation service may indeed eventually replace Facebook just as Facebook replaced MySpace and what all came before, we’re not anywhere near that happening right now. So even as today’s small handful of Facebook quitters now move on to some tiny open source social network for a few days before quietly sneaking back onto Facebook out of frustration by the end of the week (or retreat back to the odorously rotting MySpace for a bit before getting tired of holding their noses and returning), the rest of us will stick with Facebook and try to find a solution to the problem together. I’m open to ideas; you should be too.

99.994% of Facebook users not quitting on “Quit Facebook Day”

“Quit Facebook Day” has turned out to be all hype, as the number of people who’ve signed the petition stating that they intend to quit the social network over privacy issues represents less then one percent of all Facebook users – way less than one percent, in fact, as according to some quick math by PC World, a mere 0.006 percent of Facebook’s userbase has stated its intention to quit the site next week, despite the high profile media attention that the QuitFacebookDay.com site has received. The news strongly suggests that while Facebook does have legitimate privacy issues that will have to be addressed either internally by the service itself or externally by its users, the idea of quitting the service entirely as a way to “fix” things hasn’t taken off, for reasons that were obvious all along. Quitting ones job doesn’t result in better pay from that job; quitting Facebook doesn’t make for a better Facebook experience.

While it’s possible that some Facebook users may ultimately quit on “Quit Facebook Day” despite not having signed up to do so, it’s probably just as likely that a good portion of those who signed up for the list did so merely out of protest and never had any intention of quitting. As a result, by the time Quit Facebook Day is over, the site could still have even more than the 99.994% of its current users that the math suggests. This disproves Beatweek’s own earlier estimate; we had predicted that Facebook would retain a mere 99.99% percent of its users.

Those who want to force Facebook into taking user privacy seriously will apparently have to find a smarter solution than merely proposing that users all take their ball and go home; as the campaign has turned out to be a non-starter.