Ben Worthen on the WSJ Business Technology blog tells us that Bill Gates has quit Facebook:
None of those reasons caused Bill Gates to abandon his Facebook account, however. His problem is excessive celebrity. After Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook last year, Gates spent 30 minutes a day on the social-networking site, the Sun reports. “But he signed off after getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day, and spotted weird fan sites about him,” says the Sun, citing an unnamed colleague. The article linked above says he deleted the account. A Microsoft spokesperson tells us that Gates hasn’t deleted it, but that he has stopped using it because he was inundated with friend requests.
Of all the reasons to stop using Facebook, I’m not sure that’s a good one. You can turn off email notifications and you can now use Facebook’s built in ignore all requests button to churn through that problem in about 20 seconds.
I think the real problem with Gates’s Facebook use is that it was probably symbolic in the first place. Here is a man who probably, I’m guessing, doesn’t get a lot of personal value from the service. That’s fine. Facebook is not for him. Facebook is not for everybody.
Facebook is a great tool, but it’s communications-oriented. I’m guessing it’s not the best place to be a hermit 
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