What is left when you logout of Facebook?

How Facebook transitioned to being more of a platform than a product

Facebook has become a great platform, and maybe losing some of its mojo as a product. I was spending so much time on the website and iPhone app that I decided to logout, as a short experiment.

To be clear, I am still “on” Facebook, I am just not logged in anymore on Facebook.com or the mobile application. But iOS7 and OSX still have my OAuth credentials, and that way I am still plugged in to Facebook’s platform, just not the product anymore.

The two aspects I was the most afraid of loosing were the events and messenger. Facebook really succeeded in making my personal day-to-day social life revolve around their Event feature so that my friends who stayed out of Facebook stopped being invited to parties (crazy, I know! but that’s the subject for another post). As for messenger, some people seem to think Facebook is the best way to reach me, and I can’t have vacation auto-responder, email forward or anything to stay out really.

But in both cases, and many more, there’s an app for it. I kept the Facebook messenger iPhone app, and thanks to Sunrise calendar app, all of my events are still in my phone. I can also still use many apps with Single Sign-On, so I am not sure what I am missing.

I have started using Twitter a little more, reading more blogs, and news that I used to, and I even found time to think and write a few blog posts (this one being the first I’ll publish). Important to note that I have tried many applications lately, and often connected them to Facebook too, so I am not just leaving them, or switching to Twitter.

Really, I feel Facebook has built an awesome platform, and I am not sure I’d really need to log back in to the feed or profile (I certainly will). But this has been many years in the making, and with their new approach to build an ecosystem of applications, they might just be, once again, one-step ahead of the curve!