Ironically on the day it’s announced that Facebook has never been more popular, I appeared to have stopped using it. I say “appeared” because it took me a long time to realise I’d given up on it, which is my friends fault, because they didn’t realise they’d abandoned it either.

I expected more. Not the sounding of trumpets and a rain of angel feathers necessarily, but very definitely a last straw. I really wanted a last straw. I wanted Facebook to introduce a Beacon mk.2 system that rummaged through my personal details, worked out my bank details and advertised them on an RSS feed, allowing some unwashed malcontent to nick the last and only tenner from my account. Or, a virus wave to sweep over the entire thing so that every game of Scrabulous became akin to dancing barefoot with Typhoid Mary in a gutter filled with used syringes. I wanted to storm away from its charms in a huff.

I wanted it to do… something. But it hasn’t, it’s just continued. And gradually myself and my friends have simply drifted away from it. A peaceable parting of the ways. It’s not that I don’t particularly like it, for a while there it was pretty much our entire social calendar. Every party was arranged, discussed and dissected on the walls. If somebody was telling me a story, it was common for them to give up halfway through with the line: “just go and look on Facebook, I’ve stuck all the pictures on there.”

Facebook was a shorthand for my life – “here’s who he is, what’s he’s doing and how he did it” condensed onto one page for your pleasure. Old conversational gambits were suddenly redundant, nobody ever had to ask “what you’ve been up to this week”, because you knew and more so, you know exactly what I was thinking about it “Stuart is bored, Stuart is confounded, Stuart is wondering just why he is writing this.”

In the end, the novelty has worn off. I don’t think Facebook is any less useful than it was, but the novelty of being in my friend’s pockets 24/7 has worn off for me. And presumably for them too. So, we’re back on email and mobile. We make plans in the pub and dissect the resulting carnage over dinner. I’m won’t close my Facebook account, that would take effort that I don’t quite have the will to put in.

The Facebook fad has finally passed for us. Office chatter has moved onto other things, and I suspect, we’re not alone. It’s a shame, because I think Facebook deserves better than to just be slowly forgotten. I just don’t think it’ll get it.