With so many people not knowing how to get off facebook ... I thought I would try to help, as a lot of people signed up for reasons that have nothing to do with how facebook is managing data.

1) Go through and find all the emails and other contact information (AIM, twitter, blog) of your friends, and create a little database for them. You'll be surprised at how many people's emails you don't know how reliant you are on Facebook to connect you to them when you can just take some initiative and talking to them yourself. This isn't hard--it takes about 20 minutes max.

2) Go through and copy all the pictures you want to keep--if you don't have copies of them on your computer already (and you might not). This'll take 5 minutes max.

3) Delete your information. I'd say delete as much as you feel comfortable deleting--though I'd stress getting rid of a lot of your profile info. I think it's okay to leave some pictures up there and some of your other stuff... they're Facebook's anyway now. Moreover, your friends will be taking pictures of you and putting you up there, so it's not like you have to cover up all of your tracks. It'll take 5 minutes.

4) Take your contact info and send out a notification to your friends about the change. I'd try and do this in email, because then it makes people more comfortable replying to you and getting the ball rolling back in that form of connectivity. You can do it through Facebook, though--but remember that this doesn't encourage any alternative effort to contact you on their part. Moreover, Facebook doesn't let you actually send an email to all of your friends at once without creating a group (and you have to be suspicious about this, which, while trying to keep out spam, still says something about the indirect sort of communication that Facebook in reality is). This will probably take 10 minutes.

5) Do a final check and go to Accounts. At the bottom of the page will be an option to deactivate your account. Click it, ignore the bullshit about how your friends will miss you, and get the hell out of there and into newer, more truly creative forms of communicating with all those people. Also, remember that Facebook will save all your password information so that if you ever revisit the site, they'll be there waiting for you to come back--don't rejoin by mistake. But if you forgot to get rid of anything, indeed rejoin and you'll be able to get rid of it and deactivate--as they repeatedly assure you, all your stuff will be there just as it was before (since they own it). This'll take 5 seconds.

Thanks for the original post by Mike Johnduff - What is written about: Etc., Technology