You can 'unpublish' your facebook page. it won't turn up in searches and no one can view it but you, but it will still be there for your trips down memory lane.

If you go to Account Settings, at the bottom of the list there will be a "Download a Copy of Your Facebook Data" and that should be everything..

Oh, I totally blanked over all that.. lol.

Also, you cannot completely delete your Facebook account. Facebook simply turns it off to the public. If you ever came back you would just start at where you left off.

@MandyAtLarge,

You can delete your account. Facebook makes it hard to find, (I could only get at it from a Google Search), but it's there.

https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

I'm not a heavy Facebook user, but I understand its relevance to the web. I just wish there were a way to have Facebook messaging available to me, but to not follow feeds, have wallposts, check-ins, stuff like that. Kinda like a static Myspace page (or a FB public figure page), only it's your Facebook profile and noone can add or tag you on it.

I think the easiest thing to do would be to "un-publish" your profile- people do it all the time for Lent!

@FIGHTTHEFUTURE- It'd be tedious, but you can "hide" updates from friends on your news feed individually. Then, adjust your privacy settings so that others cannot post on your wall, check you in, etc.

Thanks for this! I didn't know you could do that.

Does anyone know if it's possible to not show up in everyone's feed? Meaning, I don't want everyone else seeing every time I like a picture or comment on someone else's wall. Any help/comments would be greatly appreciated!

For the people who want to keep their account but pare it down, go to your privacy settings page and poke around. You can set it so that no one is allowed to post on your wall, and so that you have to approve of it any time someone tags you in a photo or post. I don't know of any way to make your activity not show up on news feeds, but send Facebook feature requests and maybe it'll happen.

Use Social Safe, it will synch all your Facebook photos. http://www.socialsafe.net/

@CBBJORK, i don't think you can opt out of the Feed. If you post any activity to a page with open privacy settings, it shows up on your Friends' Feed because your post is public. Unless they've added a privacy setting for it recently without telling people, which is possible.

Just change your settings. Hide ur profile from public. Then have all ur photos (and all other info) only visible to yourself.

I've also walked away from FB several times. There are a few worthwhile areas, but much of it is also lame and shallow. Posting something and getting zero response is about the same as talking to yourself.

For photos, I always make a copy for FB use from the original and most stuff on the timeline gets hidden or deleted after about two weeks or less. Who really cares what went on nine months or a few years ago? Forget about stuff or have so much on FB that it'd be a gigantic task to remove, then in a way, you are forfeiting all that info to Zuckerberg.

If you make post that are only viewable to you, and just on occation make "public" post, then yeah, your post wont show up to anyone, and only the public post would show on your public page and friends feeds. You can also just make a group that really close friends, if you prefer that. Facebook actually makes it pretty easy to control who sees what you post.

Good, opt out of Facebook and get outside into the real world....the one with living breathing people, fresh air, things to do.