Today is Quit Facebook Day: nine steps to ease social networking withdrawal

For a pair of Torontonian Luddites and their followers, today is Quit Facebook Day—a day ironically memorialized by a page on, what else, Facebook. In response to privacy concerns and other issues with the social networking juggernaut, Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan launched quitfacebook.com. So far, over 23,000 people have pledged to commit Facebook suicide today. The only problem is that deleting one’s account is the easy part (even though it’s notoriously difficult to do). The real trouble begins when the harsh emptiness of a Facebook-free life sinks in.  To help with the blow, here are nine tips for dealing with Facebook withdrawal.

1. Become enlightened. Telepathy makes Facebook redundant.
2. Join the Facebook Withdrawal Support Group—again, on Facebook.
3. If the shakes become uncontrollable, Myspace makes for decent methadone (Friendster’s more like kids’ Tylenol).
4. Go literal: physically poke friends and give the thumbs-up sign.
5. Screw quizzes; just decide which Disney princess you are. The evidence is probably pretty obvious anyway.
6. Write on friends’ walls with a Sharpie.
7. Breach your ex’s privacy the old-fashioned way, with a private investigator.
8. Spread viruses manually (loose sexual scruples, coughing on streetcar poles, etc.).
9. In the absence of Farmville, get your agricultural fix by tapping inner-city trees for syrup.