A real friend is preferred to 100 virtual ones

BANGALORE, INDIA: A lot of people who got hooked to social networking are loosing interest and quitting these platforms. Some of the major reasons cited are security concern and hindrance during office hours. And they believe it is good to stop tweeting and start living.

At present, the major social networking platforms namely, Twitter and Facebook have 145 million and 500 million active users respectively. Both of them claim strong growth in registering users, but they are silent about the ones who quit it.

Interestingly, people looking forward to quit Facebook have created a community of 'I hate Facebook'. This group has already gotten a fan following of more than 8000. What an irony, Facebook haters too embrace the same platform!

Furthermore, the world celebrated QuitFacebookDay on May 31, 2010. But it was considered a miss as out of the millions of users, around 37611 people have joined hands to loathe Facebook.

Writes Daniel Fuller in one his Facebook updates of the group, “I am tired. Not going to bed as I keep thinking something interesting might pop up but I know that nothing ever does on FB. I need to get me some sleep!”

A systems designer Matthew Milan and technologist Joseph Dee, started such a website suggesting that it was for fair choices and best intentions. They wrote, “Facebook doesn't do a good job in either department.

They believe that Quitting Facebook isn't easy. “Facebook is engaging, enjoyable and quite frankly, addictive. Quitting something like Facebook is like quitting smoking.”

In a report, Danny Sullivan gave a brief calculation of what he could see as a drop in active users of Facebook. According to his rough estimation, these numbers were around 25- 50 per cent.

“As you can see, lately Facebook is reporting gains between 20 to 25 million active users per month. But Facebook looks likely to only gain 13-15 million active users per month. At worst (dropping from 25 million to 13 million), that’s a 48 per cent decline — a drop of about half. At best, dropping from 20 million to 15 million, that’s a 25 per cent decline - a 1/4 drop.”

Many youth believe that social media is a tide of enthusiasm which would sooner or later ebb away. According to a Mashable report around 60 per cent of users who signed in twitter left it within a few months.

Reportedly a lot of celebrities are said to have deleted their social media account namely Miley Cyrus, Amanda Bynes, John Mayer, even Bollywood actor Salman Khan was said be looking at saying no to social media.

A lot of users are looking at the social media platforms as addiction, which can be removed only by deleting the account while a few believe it is just about practicing self control.