I got a bit of a startled reaction today when I shared with someone that I’d quit the facebook over the summer. That’s a reasonable response, and that’s sort of why I did it–not for the shock value, but because it’s so widely accepted that facebook is something that one can’t (or at least shouldn’t) go without.

Within certain social contexts, there’s a presumption that people exist on facebook. Certainly this is true for people in high school or college and recent graduates. It’s coming to be true for the entire range of people who consider themselves "early adopters" to some degree. After making a new acquaintance, it’s become second nature to look them up and "freind" them on facebook.

But facebook long ago ceased to be a directory. For a while now it’s been evolving into a multifaceted web platform for everything from photo sharing to life streaming, from chat to scrabble. There are innumerable applications with no purpose driven function outside of the facebook universe ("you have been invited to join the zombies and pirates application" or something along these lines).

But the breaking point was the July redesign that refocused the site on the "newsfeed." At that moment it became clear that facebook was positioning itself to get in on the contested area of personal aggregation. FriendFeed and Swurl are good examples of this sort of thing–tools to connect personal output streams from a range of sites to produce a single stream to share with friends. Web identity in this approach to things is truly dynamic: you are what you’re doing. Clearly, twitter established itself here firmly, framing itself with the question "what are you doing?", but personal output can come from a blog, a photo or video sharing site, a social bookmarking tool, any number of things.

And they’re things that you choose. That’s the critical difference–facebook is a one size fits all proposition: don’t like their photo sharing capability? Tough, it’s the one that’s there. Wish you could change how your activity is presented in the newsfeed? Too bad, it’s uniformly automated. With more open, self-designed and self-organized sets of web activity, each type of tool competes with others to be the best, everything is improving and evolving and multiplying. Facebook is…facebook. You’re stuck with all the frivolous friending of unwelcome acquaintances and the ridiculous idea of representing yourself with a list of virtues.

If web identity is going to move from that towards streams of activity going from each person to their friends and back, that shouldn’t take place under the reactionary auspices of facebook. So I quit. We’ll see if I have trouble convincing people I am who I claim to be if I don’t have a profile to back me up…