OK, I admit it. I don’t like FaceBook. I know it’s hard to believe that there’s someone who actually doesn’t enjoy using the incredibly popular social networking tool — but I don’t.

It’s not that FaceBook isn’t useful or doesn’t allow me to keep up with people — it’s actually been quite useful for that. I’ve reconnected with people that I would have never had the chance to meet up with again otherwise, which has been fun. It’s also fun to check out people’s pictures and connections and see who knows who.

My problem with FaceBook is that I can’t really keep up with the messages and notifications. A long time ago I just assigned all FaceBook messages a particular priority in my email (which essentially is ‘I will never actually look at this’). Instead, I occasionally log in to FaceBook to see if I have any messages — which I often do. I then have a ton of non-personal invites to things (like associations’ groups I belong to on FaceBook, don’t ask me why), which I try to ignore.

Mingled in with these are messages from actual people that I’d like to hear from. Unfortunately, there are sometimes actual, real, time-sensitive (think invitations to real things, not ‘association’ auto-invites) things that I’ve missed. I then sit around pondering why I have FaceBook at all if I’m never going to actually log in.

I suppose having a FaceBook account provides people I know with a reasonable expectation that I’ll log in regularly and check my messages. So I’m going to give this FaceBook thing another shot — I’m going to try to respond more regularly to FaceBook messages. And to anyone I’ve ever not responded to on FaceBook — it’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, I’m just terrible at actually logging in.

And if that doesn’t work, I may have to seriously consider just unFaceBooking.