See: The State of the Facebook Platform | 20bits. The number of active users has declined 27 % since January. Early adopters are leading the pack out.

I deactivated in December, 2007 (See: “I deactivated my Facebook Account, is LinkedIn Next?“), reactivated for a few days earlier this year, and then deactivated again. For good.

I did cancel my LinkedIn account, too. As I discussed in a post about it, if everyone has their own blog and RSS feed we can just communicate through those.

And I still think every patient should have a blog that their physician has access too through the electronic health record.

I think the The Economist does a nice job describing the state of social networking and its future fate:

Online social networks | Everywhere and nowhere | Economist.com

In the end, we’ll just all have a blog, without a need to have an account on any specific system. Our patients will have one too. This doesn’t mean everything will be an open book, just that we will be on one open-source platform that communicates in some fashion via RSS. The fun part will be connecting those life experiences to the right people at the right time. In Health IT, I think it will be very advantageous for a patient to consent to share aspects of their life experiences with their doctor. This is very consistent with the chronic care model.

And I deleted my LinkedIn account, too.

I am a big fan of everything Web 2.0, including social networking. I just decided that the negatives of Facebook outweighed the positives and deactivated my account. Why? First, what I liked about Facebook was that it was a “professional” social networking community. A person used their real name and real interests. Facebook at the same time did a very nice job of creating exquisite privacy controls, so that your friends could know about what they needed to know, and professional contacts could know what they needed to know.

Then Facebook opened up the world of applications, which was interesting enough. Except that applications begat applications. I couldn’t find someone’s Wall to write on. I had to find the super-duper-neon-Wall 3.0. And then the requests came from friends to add application x or application y to my account so I could rate them, compare myself to them, etc etc. I think we need to get back to a time and place where we sit down and tell each other how we feel in person. Perhaps I am revealing my GenX-ness in that comment. But maybe not.

And finally, the news that maybe the monetizing application isn’t going so well made the decision a relatively easy one.

I have an identity here that people can find just by Google-ing me. All the applications I need I have added.

I’m a little worried that there’s going to be a bump in the social-networking road at this point.

And I’m still trying to figure out what the value of LinkedIn is.