So long to the Book of Face

This is totally not interesting to those of you who don’t know me personally, but I’m deleting my facebook account.

As I go about notifying people and saving contact information, I keep getting asked why. This is the long, technical answer:

Facebook isn’t that fun anymore. I’ve actually been thinking about deleting my account for years, more seriously in the last year.

I don’t use it the way it’s meant to be used because I’m no longer comfortable posting information with the site’s convoluted privacy policy. It’s too hard to control who sees what (and I don’t even mean friends I just mean public vs. private). I hate that Facebook can just decide to share information like my name and profile picture with everyone everywhere just because it’s considered “basic” information. I want to make that choice. The fact that Facebook was recently hacked and seems determined to make privacy settings harder to manage every few months also helps.

I also prefer Twitter. It’s more my speed and it’s just simpler to manage and use. I don’t like logging into facebook to know what’s going on. I prefer communicating with email or cell phone so now I’ll have to.

I recently was talking to a friend about the whole public vs. private/personal persona thing and I’m finding that as my public profile is getting larger thanks to this blog and my library blog, I find that it’s easier to keep it all public instead of separating public and private. Facebook, well I wasn’t comfortable with it being public so I’m deleting it.

I recently told my mom about this and she, perhaps sagely, told me that between my blogs and book club I am really my own facebook. Probably not entirely accurate but I thought it was a good sentiment. So I’m using the information here to completely delete my account. I’m also pulling contact information (and birthdays) manually from facebook because I’m an idiot and didn’t think of a faster way to do it. Every time I remember something else to save and log on only to have Facebook say my perfectly fine password is not correct, I want to punch the site in the face. So there’s also that as a motivating factor.

Will I lose touch with people or miss out on some things only posted on Facebook? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way I’ll still be on here and on twitter (if you need contact information for me because I somehow missed you in my notification blitz, just let me know in the comments–with a valid email in the email box).

Some Links for Readers

I’m not even sure how I found these (I think The Librarian Kate may have retweeted something about a link or some such). Anyway, I thought these might be useful for anyone looking to do some quick reader’s advisory or just looking for some rapid fire book recommendations for their own to read piles. The sites don’t do so well with cross-genre pairings, but then I’m sure you all know to come here and look at my possible pairings within each review when you want something like that!

• First up we have we have Your Next Read. I like this site because it’s very visual with book cover images for each recommendation. The site is also very dynamic. You can rate recommendations, add your own, and bounce between books (be warned: it’s kind of addictive.) The site is a little wonky with multiple editions of the same book showing up separately, but if you search with title and author you usually get what you’re looking for with a few decent recommendations besides. Here’s an example for If I Stay by Gayle Forman since I was just talking about that with Lola. It’s a great tool to use in tandem with goodreads though sometimes (like every time but while I’m writing this) it works better than others.
• A similar site is The Book Seer. This site is similar to the first but I found it a little less dynamic. It also gets annoyed when you don’t include an author so it’s not quite as quick and dirty as the Your Next Read. The recommendations are good for the most part (even for pre-pub titles) but it’s not as visual with only title and author for recs as can be seen in this example for City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare. It also includes a lot of titles from the same series. Like, I get that Wicked Lovely could be a good pairing for this book, that doesn’t mean I need every title in the series listed. You also need to type in every new title, no option to bounce around. The site supposedly recommends titles from LibraryThing (not my fave book site) but I’ve yet to see it actually return any results.

So, together with a site like goodreads or amazon (and my old standby KDL’s What’s Next Database) you should have everything you need here to be a regular reader’s advisory maven (which apparently can be used to refer to men and women, who knew?) even if you are outside of your genre comfort zone. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Neither site works very well with children’s books (YA books work fine, don’t ask me why). When I did a search on BookSeer for Nate Fludd books I got no results. YourNextRead only recommended other books in the series/by the author though that one you can add your own recommendations and conceivably thereby “fix” that shortcoming. YNR also sometimes randomly displays no recommendations but refreshing fixes that.