I had thought about joining Facebook but had some questions which you have answered very well in this article. This will help me avoid waste time.

Half of the people who leave Facebook don’t come back — it is interesting to know that Facebook marketing portrays this as a positive thing. And there must be some marketing correction factor in that data too.

Granted, I am not a 40-something but here is where my experience differs from yours. FB for me is a social network, LI a business network. I keep the two separate because my “need” (even latent) of knowing certain details of the lives of the people I know differs depending on my interaction with them. FB feeds in a drip feed mode information that keeps me loosely connected to the lives of many to whom I will never write an email but with whom, if I meet at a dinner party, I shall have plenty to talk about. LI on the other hand keeps me updated with my professional contacts’ professional progress and I am happy with the manner and frequency of update. Of course my nephews and nieces are “friends” with me on FB but since I do not know them in a professional capacity, they will not be my contacts on LI, where I keep my network only limited to those I know and can vouch for. In an odd way, I am probably an LI purist and can not begin to trust those who boast of 500+ contacts. I also accept no approaches from those with whom I have had no professional contact.

Both networks have separate purposes. LI to me is a close-ties network, whereas FB is a loose-ties one. Over time some contacts may find their way to the other network but a 100% overlap sure makes one or the other redundant (and raises the question of the efficacy of either of them). Most research on network effects suggests that loose-ties are more effective and valuable than close-ties, both professionally and personally.

There is of course an age factor. Many of my most effective business contacts only ever use the “telephone network”!

Since the either-or is far from settled, all experiences - including yours - are rich data contributing to that understanding

I figured the only other way to get out of Facebook (that existed till now) was to attempt a mischief like Robert Scoble did. Try shifting your contacts from facebook using Plaxo script, pray to get caught and thrown out. Enabling voluntary ejection is truly empowering. Not all annoyed souls can be artful hackers. Facebook brand of democracy may be:)

It looks lot less scam now. The Web 2.0 geeks built their *Velcro business models* tried putting everything in the cloud and on open-source stack and raved about the freedom from vendor lock-in, while locking their own users in. It took a while to dawn on the users - You need to sweat out to get out.